


Baby, Just Say "Yes"

by beyondthewayfarers



Category: Stray Kids (Band)
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Developing Relationship, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Falling In Love, Fluff, Fluff and Humor, Inappropriate Humor, Kissing, Lee Minho | Lee Know is Whipped, Love, Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-23
Updated: 2020-09-30
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:07:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 39,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23800528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beyondthewayfarers/pseuds/beyondthewayfarers
Summary: A fic loosely based on the movie "Letters to Juliet".Lee Byeol is in the Italian city of love when she meets the Secretaries of Juliet, the people who write letters back to those who seek advice from Juliet. When she finds herself writing back to one of the letters, she also finds that she plunges into the world of Lee Minho, the hot-headed best friend of Hwang Hyunjin, the person she had written to. Together with her newfound friends, they set out on a journey to find Lee Felix, Hwang Hyunjin's lost love.
Relationships: Hwang Hyunjin/Lee Felix, Lee Minho | Lee Know & Original Female Character(s)
Kudos: 14





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I know I was supposed to finish the other fic I was writing (Goddess of Spring) before this one, but I remember I had this one in the archives and decided to post this :----) This has been sitting in the closet for about two months now, and I hope you enjoy this one! It's a really long one, but I really enjoyed writing and rewriting a lot of this.

Lee Byeol, master of finding herself lost in any given situation, was currently and utterly hopeless on what to do on her very first day in the city of love. Verona was large enough for her considering she was alone on this journey, so she was anxious to go out and do whatever tourists did in the city. There was one place she had in mind, but due to her staring at the ceiling for most of the day, she wasn’t sure if it would still be open. 

She took her chances and grabbed her brown leather satchel, straightened out her white, asymmetrical, lace dress, made sure her mousy brown hair was straight, and went out the door. Hotel del Cielo, the small building she was staying in, was a couple of kilometers away from the Juliet statue, which was where she was headed. Though she knew that it would probably be closing time, she still took small strides—well, that was kind of a given since she was quite a small person. Still, she thought that if it was meant to happen, it would happen.

Thankfully, there were only a handful of people in the area. The Juliet statue was a sight to behold; it was a singular bronze figure of the said woman, her hair in an elegant updo and her beautiful yet solemn face staring down at those who wished to touch her right breast for good luck in love. The house was something else as well. The fourteenth-century house was made of brick and and stone, with four stationary windows sticking out of the second floor of the Cappello home, and only one window that had a balcony built in front of it. She guessed that this was the famous balcony, considering that there were people yelling from it with their companions taking pictures of them from the ground. The walls were covered in different colored pieces of paper, which were probably the famous—or sometimes infamous—letters to Juliet, asking her for help in love problems. She was thinking of writing one, but she didn’t exactly know what to write about when she was utterly loveless.

“Well, now’s as good a time as ever,” she whispered to herself as she drew herself closer to the statue. It was a little bit violating, she supposed, to be touching the statue’s breast, but if it was to give her good fortune in love and if it was a tradition that many were fine with, then she guessed it would be just fine. She brought her hand up and touched it. “If you give me a good chance at love, I swear to you that I’ll bring you up in the next term.” She found herself laughing a little bit at how absurd she sounded, but it was fine. Everyone needed a little ridiculousness in their lives once in a while. 

Suddenly, there was a loud ringing coming from her satchel, and she brought out from her bag her touchscreen phone and put it to her ear. “Hello, hello,” she said into the phone. 

“Why didn’t you call me, you asshole? I told you to tell me when you’ve landed and checked in,” her friend said, practically hearing the frown and pout in his voice. “Please tell me you’re safe and not kidnapped by the mafia.” 

She chuckled at her friend’s concern. “I’m fine, Jeongin,” she said truthfully. “I’m actually here at Juliet’s house. Literally just finished touching her breast—don’t you think it’s a little weird for people to be touching it?”

“It really is, though.” 

“I thought so,” she said. 

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a man with blond hair in a black leather jacket and similarly colored jeans, a basket slung on his arm filled with the letters from the walls. He was picking them one by one and placing them in his basket with a smile on his face, and in a few seconds, he started whistling a happy tune. It was a peculiar sight, and when he finished, he started walking away.

Jeongin was talking about lesson plans in her ear, but she couldn’t properly process what he was saying because of that man with the basket. “Jeongin, I have to go,” she said quickly as she started chasing the man. 

“Are you okay?” Jeongin asked, concerned about her once again. “I can ask someone to pick you up or something.” 

“No, no, I’m fine,” she said as she struggled to keep the man in her sight due to the volume of people she bumped into and apologized to. “I’m just in the middle of chasing a man with a basket.”

There was silence on the other line before he said, “Are you alright in the head right now?” 

“Yes, I am!” she almost yelled into the phone as she weaved through the crowd. “I gotta go now, okay? I’ll tell you all about it later.” She hung up, pocketed it, and continued to follow the man. 

She followed him into a small restaurant called “Trattoria Lettere a Giulietta”, a building so elegantly covered in vines. Rustic and homey, she would call it, but there were barely any customers. There was a small spiral staircase to the back of the restaurant, and she snuck past a waiter whose back was to her, and stalked the man up the stairs. There was a little bit of a distance between her and the blond, and she kept it that way just in case he thought that it was a little weird for her following him. It really was weird, but curiosity couldn’t kill the cat if it had enough lives. 

Once she reached the top of the staircase, it led to a singular room with the door open, and inside it were a few guys crowding over the basket that the blond man had just set down. The room was a mess; there were books stacked on the windowsill, papers were scattered over the shared desk they had, and antique plates in glass cabinets lined the walls. It was as if they converted an old house into a working space, and it looked like that was the case.

They didn’t seem to notice her, so she knocked on the door and all four heads turned her way. Suddenly, she felt very small and shy. “ _Buongiorno_ ,” she said, and she guessed it was time to put her English to use. “I’m sorry for intruding.” 

“It’s alright,” the blond man said with a smile, his accent thick with Australian roots. “What do you need?”

“It was just that…” She didn’t exactly know how to say that she creeped up to the restaurant by following him just because he was carrying a basket filled with Juliet letters. “I saw you carrying the letters from the Juliet statue to here, so I was just wondering why you did that.” 

The blond man looked at his companions and they all shrugged, also unsure of what to say. That, or they didn’t really want to entertain her. She felt a pang in her heart, but she continued to stand her ground. 

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, her manners catching up to her. She bowed to them and said, “My name is Lee Byeol. I’m an English teacher from Korea, currently vacationing here in Verona. Sorry for being terribly rude.” 

“Korea?” the man with black hair and an elongated face said in Korean. “Are you Korean, too?” 

Stupid. She was absolutely stupid for not realizing earlier that everyone in the room had looked like her, looked like they were from the same country as she was. “Yes, I am,” she said, and she could finally blow out a sigh of relief when they actually understood her. “I’m sorry I didn’t realize it earlier.”

“It’s alright,” the man in the black leather jacket said, a grin plastered on his face. She guessed this guy was always smiling, no matter the situation, and she found that a little comforting. “My name is Bang Chan, but you can call me Chan. We run the Secretaries of Juliet here in Verona.” 

At first, she was confused, but when she took a look at the others’ expectant faces, something inside her just clicked. “You’re all Juliet,” she said. 

“That’s right,” Chan said. 

She smiled brightly at him, knowing that this would make a juicy memory to store in her head. “So, you take all the letters from the house and you do… what again, exactly?” 

“We write back to those who ask Juliet for help,” the youngest-looking of them said. He looked like he was a little boy, but his eyes betrayed his youth by looking like they had seen things no one else had. “Only those with return addresses, of course.” 

“So you really all are Juliet,” she said in wonder and amazement. “This is great. Really great. And so you send them to those people… do you get any letters back?”

Chan nodded. “Sometimes, we do, but they’re all just thank you letters. Some stood out, but they were from a long time ago.”

“Wow, that’s amazing,” she said, her eyes wide. 

As if he came to his senses, Chan shook his head quickly and said, “Sorry for not introducing them, but let me do this now.”

She nodded as she stepped into the room, meeting the guys’ eyes as Chan introduced them. 

“This is Kim Seungmin,” Chan said, pointing his four fingers at his companion. “He’s the youngest, but he’s been in a relationship longer than any of us. He’s only been married for five years, but he’s been with his partner for more than twelve years in total. He writes to those who have marriage problems.” 

Seungmin smiled politely at her and said, “Husbands are like wine; they take ages to mature.” 

She couldn’t help but laugh at his remark, knowing that it was pretty much true for every single guy out there. She’s had her fair share of fuckboys and men with daddy issues, so with her experience, she could definitely agree with Seungmin. 

Aw, shoot, here it comes again. The feelings of resentment and regret. She tried to push the thoughts down as hard as she could.

Chan then motioned over to the man with a chin as sharp as a knife, with eyes as deep as the ocean. “That’s Changbin over there. He deals with heartbreak, illness, and loss. You could say that he’s been through a lot.” 

In turn, the man saluted her as a greeting. “Hello,” she said while smiling, her eyes turning into crescents. She was also known for her eye smile, but no one here really needed to know that. 

“Lastly, that’s our eldest, Woojin,” he said to the silent man farthest from her. Even though he was quiet, his eyes seemed to lure her in, and he had the kindest face she’d ever seen. “He writes whatever he likes, really. He’s an all-rounder.” 

Woojin nodded at her without a word, though his toothy smile welcomed her. 

“Hey, Chan, what about you?” Byeol asked, curious as a cat. “Who do you write to?”

The eldest picked up a piece of paper from the basket, the contents of the letter wet and barely legible to the rest of them, but apparently… “Chan writes to the ones whose letters are like this. Someone has to take care of them, and well, he’s the one.” 

“This is amazing,” she said, clapping her hands. “It’s my first day in Verona and I come to this.” 

“It’s about to get even better, Byeol,” Chan said, picking up a dated, yellowed, and crumpled envelope from the basket and held it in front of her. “You can start with this.” 

She gasped in disbelief as the other three looked at her expectantly, their eyes wide with excitement and hope. “You’re kidding, right? You just met me, and you’re asking me to respond to a letter?” 

“You were the only one brave enough to follow Chan back to HQ, so I think Chan sees you as something special,” Changbin said, probably a little bit too foolishly. “Looks like the rest of us don’t have a problem with it, do we?” 

The others shrugged and shook their heads, and Byeol was above the roof as she took the envelope from him. Chan oriented her on what to do; what to say, what not to say, how to write legibly, and how to properly send the letters. She took a desk facing Chan and started tearing the envelope open, little by little, ever so carefully. 

Reading the back of the envelope, she read, “‘Hwang Hyunjin’, huh?” She brought the letter out from its case and started reading it in her head. It was written purely in English, but she knew that a name like that would be from her own country.

“ _Juliet, forgive me, for I don’t know what to do. I’m going to be leaving Felix, the love of my life, here in Verona, all because my parents won’t approve. I don’t know how to tell him… All I know is that I love him with all my heart and I wouldn’t trade him for the world. Please, Juliet, tell me what to do._ ”

By the time she finished reading the rest of Hwang Hyunjin’s letter, she was already moved to tears. It was short and concise, but nothing short of tearjerking and filled to the brim with love. She didn’t exactly know what kind of love Hyunjin had with Felix, but she was sure it was a love that was worth crossing oceans for, a love worth disobeying your parents for. Not sure of the outcome that came out of the situation, she decided to write from her heart.

“ _Dearest Hyunjin, the meaning of strength is to persevere through obstacles no matter what the given situation is. Love, it turns out, needs a sheer amount of it. Now, I don’t fully know what happened between you and Felix, but I do know that with the most sincere of intentions, I wish you well, as I’m only here as a testament to the strength and honesty of your true love. All I can offer is that in your case, you will never be without it, and that is simply enough._ ” 

Before she knew it, it was already nighttime when she’d come up with a proper and complete response to Mr. Hwang’s letter. Chan loomed over her shoulder, one hand on the back of the chair, his eyes directed towards the paper she held in her hand. “I spent at least an hour trying to write the first sentence, and I still feel like it’s not good enough,” she confessed as she slumped back in her chair. “This letter was dated over ten years ago, and sent to an address back in Korea. I can’t imagine loving someone for that long, and so far apart.” 

“Don’t sweat it,” Chan said, lightly flicking the piece of paper. “I believe this is a really good reply; I can tell it comes from the heart. You should send it.”

She bit her lip and fidgeted with the piece of paper in her hand, ultimately deciding on slipping it into a long pink envelope and placing it in the basket, ready for post tomorrow morning. Writing the reply took all the strength out of her, though she noticed that Seungmin was already asleep on his desk, a piece of inked paper stuck to his left cheek. Woojin was off to the side, still writing his heart away, and Changbin was already picking up his dark blue tweed coat, about to leave. 

“Leaving already?” Byeol said with a slight yawn in her voice.

“Yup, it’s getting a little bit late,” Changbin said a little quietly, careful not to wake the youngest. “What about you?”

She shrugged and took one last look at her letter on top of the pile. “I’m probably going to call it a night.”

“Would you like me to walk you to your hotel? It’s not too far away from here,” Woojin said with a smile, though he didn’t look up from what he was writing. “I’ll be done in a jiffy.” 

“That would be really nice,” Byeol replied. “Take your time.” 

A little while later, Changbin said his farewells and left the room while Chan went to wake up Seungmin, who was already drooling on his letters. Soon enough, Woojin was finished with his letters, and it was Byeol’s time to say goodbye to the rest of the party. They agreed to meet again tomorrow for another round of letters, since Chan was so absorbed in what she’d written. She was more than glad to serve the Secretaries. 

“So, how did the Secretaries of Juliet come to be?” Byeol asked Woojin as they headed back to her hotel. “There’s gotta be a cool story to that, at least.” 

“Well, it’s less cool thank you might have expected,” he replied. “It started over twenty years ago, back when we were all young and unknowing. Our parents and their parents established the Secretaries of Juliet when they first saw the letters stuck on the walls with bubblegum. We just took over when our parents retired.” 

“So you’re saying that your parents were just friends and then you guys became friends, too?” she asked.

Woojin nodded in her direction as he started kicking a small stone with his authentic Italian leather shoes. “Our parents just passed it on to us, since they believed we were the newest generation of writers.” A small smile crept up his face as he nudged her with his shoulder. “It looks like you’ll be one of us very soon.” 

“Don’t be ridiculous; I’ll never be as good of a writer as you guys are,” she said partially in jest and partially in truth. “Besides, I’m only staying here for three weeks; I don’t think I can be a permanent fixture here.” 

His heart seemed to drop to his stomach when she said that, which was kind of telling when he stopped playing with the rock. “That’s a shame. Well, we’ll do what we can to make your stay here memorable, at the very least. I hope we achieved some part of that today.” 

“Are you kidding? This was a really good first day,” she said, clearly excited in recalling the events that day. “A little bit tiring, I suppose, but it’s nothing compared to how good I feel right now. It feels amazing to be part of what you guys do.”

“It’s an honorable job, but not a notable one,” Woojin confessed, a little bit sad about it.

“This is something I’ll remember for the rest of my life,” she told him, and she basically willed it into existence. It really was something to be remembered, and like Hwang Hyunjin said, she wouldn’t trade it for the world. It felt really fulfilling to do something like that, and maybe—just maybe—there was a little bit more hope in the world because of her.

A week and a half later, they received a reply.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Second chapter lezgooo :D I decided to post this on the same day 'cause I didn't want to just post the introduction and end it with a cliffhanger, so here you go! :D I'll think about posting the third one soon, since I just need to proofread that one and make sure the events line up perfectly. Here you go in the meantime! Leave some comments if you'd like. That'll really help me in the future. <3 Thanks, and happy reading (I hope)!

It was a nice Sunday dusk as she was peacefully writing to her third person of the day when a certain someone rolled up to the Secretaries office, his black hair all styled up, his blue and white striped polo tucked into his all-white knee-high shorts, his red high-cut sneakers practically dirtied up. There were several piercings in his ear, and the silver earrings dangled and shone in the bright Verona light. He looked like he wasn’t from here, and from the slant of his eyes, she knew exactly what to say to him.

“Hello,” she said in Korean, and, as she was the first to notice him, the others’ heads whipped around to where she was looking. “What can we do for you?”

“Oh, you’re all Korean,” he said, his mellow voice somewhat betraying his stylish looks. He took a bow and said, “I’m sorry for intruding, but my name is Lee Minho, and I come here from Korea.” 

“That much is noticeable,” Chan said with a small smile. “Again, what can we do for you, Minho?” 

He held up a piece of paper with some writings on it, but she couldn’t exactly make out what was written on it. “I’d just like to know who wrote this letter to my best friend, Hwang Hyunjin?” 

Her jaw practically dropped to the floor when he said what he said, and she found that she couldn’t pick it back up. “A-Are you for real?” she stuttered, absolutely dumbfounded at what had just come out of Minho’s mouth. 

“What do you mean am I for real?” Suddenly, his tone changed and his eyes turned into angry slits, but Byeol was too excited and too happy for words that she didn’t really notice it. “I’m guessing you’re the one who wrote it.” 

She nodded violently and she stood up to greet him. “My name is—“

“I couldn’t care less what your name is, miss,” he suddenly interjected, and she was completely taken aback by what he just said. “All I know is that you gave my best friend false hope and resurrected an entire shitshow once again, something that I thought he would have forgotten by now.” 

Byeol struggled to find words to say to the rude-ass visitor they just witnessed come into their office. “I’m… sorry? I didn’t know that it was something that shouldn’t be brought up once again; as far as I knew, it was just a harmless reply to an old letter.” 

Minho smirked at her. “What you thought was a harmless reply actually did more harm than good.”

“I don’t know what else to say other than I’m sorry,” she said truthfully. “I just wanted to—“

“Save it for someone who cares,” he spat and stormed off, his footsteps echoing throughout the hallway downstairs.

The entire room was silent as she tried to figure out a comeback. Her eyebrows furrowed and her vision narrowed as turbulent thoughts started to come together in her head.

“Byeol—“ Woojin started.

“I’m going to give that guy a piece of my mind,” she said with finality as she stomped towards the exit, trying to keep the jet black head in her sight at all times. She caught up with him and was within earshot when she said, “If you’re so goddamn smug, why are you here with your best friend’s letter? Shouldn’t you be off in Korea doing some other things that old ill-tempered people do?” 

His head whipped towards her, the same grumpy look wiped across his face. “Oh, great, you’re still here,” he mumbled, even though it was pretty audible to her. “I couldn’t let my best friend go alone to this place, so I came here with him. Are you happy now?” 

“You know what? You’re right; I _am_ happy now, knowing that _the_ Hwang Hyunjin is here,” she said as she happily skipped in his direction, knowing fully well where Minho was headed. They didn’t speak for the rest of the way and she simply followed his trail towards the Juliet house, where a man in a simple white jumper, light jeans, and black and white sneakers stood in the middle of the area, his eyes scanning the walls lined with different kinds of paper. She couldn’t believe his features, either, because he seemed like he was sculpted with the most beautiful of visuals in mind; his face was properly chiseled and his features were soft yet angular. His lips were full and looked like they were just begging to be kissed. He looked just as young as she did, maybe even younger. All of these didn’t matter, however, because as she was interested in what Hwang Hyunjin had to say, she slithered over in their direction. 

She made eye contact with Minho just as he rolled his eyes and said, “Oh, for fuck’s sake. Hyunjin, your knight in shining armor is here.” 

She and Hyunjin stared at each other, his expression one of warmth, and hers one of childishness and pure joy. “Hyunjin, hi,” she said, bowing. “I’m the one that wrote you the letter. I can’t believe you’re actually here—I’m Lee Byeol, by the way.” 

“Lee Byeol,” he repeated, his eyes turning into small slits as he smiled. “It’s a pleasure to meet you after you wrote to me.” 

“It’s so good to meet you, oh my god,” she said in a rush, and Hyunjin couldn’t help but chuckle at her excitement. “But how did you get the letter this quick? I thought you would be in Korea.” 

“Are you actually going to entertain her, Hyunjin?” Minho asked his friend in disbelief, jabbing his thumb in her direction. 

It was then Hyunjin’s turn to roll his eyes as he tried to pacify his friend. “Don’t mind Mr. Lee Minho here. He doesn’t believe in love and other things like that,” he explained and Minho huffed where he stood. “We were actually on a tour of Rome when my mother got the letter back in Korea. She sent the contents over to me online and we made a detour here.” 

“You mean it wasn’t on the itinerary to go here to Verona after all this time?” she asked.

Hyunjin shrugged and shook his head. “It really wasn’t,” he confessed, albeit a little sadly. “This place brings certain memories to mind, and I really wasn’t sure if I should go and revisit them.” 

“I’m so sorry it turned out to be this way.” 

She started to fidget with the hem of her lace shirt, but Hyunjin seemed to sense her anxiety as he waved his hand dismissively. “Don’t sweat it; it’s not your fault that I feel like this about things. It’s only Grumpy over here that thinks you did some damage.” 

The said friend wouldn’t look her in the eye. Instead, he simply crossed his arms and examined his surroundings like a petulant child, and this made her smile a little bit. “So, what exactly are you here for, Hyunjin?” 

His gaze drifted over to above him, looking over to the open balcony and the closed windows, as if his mind was somewhere else as well. “To be honest, I’m not so sure,” he said absentmindedly. “I was thinking about visiting, uh, certain places.” 

“Do you mean… Felix, by any chance?”

Hyunjin nodded, but his friend seemed to disagree with him. For the first time today, the guy showed genuine concern. “Hyunjin, are you really going to go see Felix? What if it turns out that he has someone else? What if he doesn’t remember you? Or worse…”

Silence. It looked like Hyunjin didn’t even consider the last option, but his eyes still searched for the right answer. “I’ll take my chances,” he managed to say with a somewhat depressing smile. “After all, Byeol did tell me that I have to persevere through certain obstacles. What’s one more, right?”

Her face brightened up like the sun and what came out of her mouth surprised even her. “Hyunjin, I know this is going to sound like the most moronic thing you’ve ever heard—“

“Anything that comes out of your mouth is already too much of that,” Minho said under his breath. 

“—but would you mind if I came with you to see Felix?” 

“ _What?_ ” 

Not going to lie; Hyunjin was stunned into silence when he heard what she’d just said. On top of that, Minho was already trying to come up with something to say, but instead, shocked noises just came out of his mouth. This was the most impulsive Byeol had ever been, but she decided to speak her mind when it came to Hyunjin because it was now or never. 

“I don’t know what a love like yours is like,” she started. “But I would definitely love to find out, if you’d let me.” 

“Great. She knows nothing and she’s coming along. What a great surprise.” 

Glaring her hardest at him, she said, “Everyone is entitled to stupidity, Lee Minho, but you seem to be abusing the privilege.” 

Hyunjin’s jaw dropped to the floor as he started laughing almost hysterically, slapping his thigh and curling up into himself. “Oh my god, I want to keep you in my pocket,” he said to her, and she couldn’t help but grin her widest grin at him. “And with that, you’ve earned my trust. It would be the greatest honor for you to come with us, Byeol.”

Minho’s lip curled. “Feisty, but commendable.” 

“Lovely!” she practically screamed as she started clapping her hands excitedly. “Thank you so much! You don’t know how happy this makes me.” 

“You don’t know how happy this makes me, too,” the other guy said sarcastically, but she paid him no mind, slowly learning to tune him out. 

“We’ll leave tomorrow after lunch,” Hyunjin said. “The place we’re heading to is a small dance area around the outskirts of Verona. I’m sure they’ll have information about Felix there.” 

Minho’s head cocked to the side. “You mean you don’t know where the guy lives?” 

Hyunjin shook his head. “I only ever met him during our dance classes. I guess that would be a good place to start.” 

“Then that’s where we’ll go.” She said this with a smile, and Hyunijn smiled back at her. 

It took a lot of convincing—mostly Minho, really—for them to go back to HQ so that she could introduce them to the Secretaries, and in the end, they agreed to come with her. They all met up in the restaurant where they sat with Hyunjin at the head of the table, with his right hand man and Byeol sitting the closest to him. They ordered different breads and cheeses to snack on, coupled with glasses of red wine to loosen up the nerves. It was then that Seungmin wondered what their love story was, and Hyunjin managed to pluck up the courage to start. 

“I met him ten years ago when I was just fifteen-years-old. I was sent to Italy to learn contemporary, and though I hated it—and my parents for sending me—Felix made me realize that it wasn’t so bad after all. Back then, we’d only known each other for three months, but I knew that even if I didn’t believe in it then, it was definitely love at first sight.”

Byeol was sure her eyes were shining brighter and brighter with each word he spoke. Meanwhile, Minho simply looked and picked at his food, looking like he’d heard this story a million times. There was something about him that bothered her, too, but she wasn’t exactly sure what—aside from his heinous attitude, that is.

“He had this wonderful eye smile, much like Byeol’s.” 

“Blech,” Minho whispered under his breath and Byeol simply rolled her eyes and signaled for Hyunjin to continue.

“He looked so much younger than me, but he definitely went through more things than I did. I remember we packed food like these… some bread he’d secretly stolen from his dinner table, and we used to share them under the shade of the trees in the area we practiced in. We would tell stories about each other’s home countries. We would talk endlessly about anything and everything under the sun; it was a wonderful time.” 

She waited for the “but” at the end of his storytelling, and she knew it was coming.

“It was at the end of three months when my parents told me I would be sent back to Korea. I knew my parents wouldn’t approve if I introduced him to them because I was closeted to them back then, and I didn’t know how else to tell him, so he saw me off at the airport with a broken vow.”

“You weren’t able to go back to him ever since then?” Changbin asked. 

Hyunjin shook his head and gingerly placed his clasped hands on the table. “The secret kind of slipped out when I told them why I wanted to go back, and they banned me from any travel to Italy ever since then. It was only after how many years since then that they accepted me for who I am, and that they allowed me to go back here, and so here I am. To be honest, I didn’t think I would actually be back here in Verona, but something brought me back.” Hyunjin softly grabbed her wrist as a sign of thanks, and Byeol covered his hand with hers. 

“I’m so glad recruiting Byeol here came to fruition,” Chan said, beaming at her. “It’s great when things like these happen, and we’re more than happy that you’ve come to visit Verona once again.” 

“I’m happy as well. Truly, I am,” Hyunjin said with a sad smile, “but I don’t know what to do if ever I do meet him. It’s been so long and I don’t think he’ll remember me.” 

“You can always make new memories with him,” Byeol suggested with a shy smile.

“Did you learn that from all the sappy romance novels you’ve read? It’s definitely not working,” Minho said unhelpfully. “What if Hyunjin ends up disappointed with how things turn out? What if everything, just because of some girl who wrote him a letter, brings my friend back down into deep depression?” 

“ _Minho_ ,” Hyunjin scolded, his eyebrows coming together. “There’s no need for you to be so pessimistic about everything.” 

“I can’t help it; I’m a realist.” 

Byeol sighed, already ticked off by him. “If he doesn’t remember him, then that’s that. Hyunjin himself said that he’s ready to face any obstacle; why can’t you?” 

One of the iciest glares came from Minho, and he cleared his throat and stood up, prepping himself to leave. “Well, that’s enough tearjerkers for tonight. I’m going back to the hotel.” And with that, he was off, his hands pocketed in his shorts. 

“Please don’t say Hotel del Cielo,” she whispered to the gods above, but the gods didn’t hear her prayer.

“You’re right, though,” Hyunjin consoled, rubbing the back of her hand. “I gotta go and make sure he doesn’t do anything rash or reckless.” 

“I’ll do it,” Byeol said. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to talk about with him, anyway. You can stay here and continue to talk with the rest.” 

“Bless your heart,” Hyunjin said just before she tried to catch up to Minho. 

She tried to make her footsteps as quiet as possible, but she knew he’d already heard her by the time she was a few inches behind him. “Hey,” she called out softly, knowing that the wound would still be fresh. 

“Fucking woohoo,” he grumbled as he looked down and started kicking a pebble with the tips of his shoes. “What do you want now, Lee Byeol?”

She smiled a little bit at him, teasing the hell out of him. “That’s the first time you’ve called me by my name. Sounds like you’re warming up to me now, huh?” 

“Are you delusional?”

“Just a little bit. Everyone needs a little bit of ridiculousness in their lives; that’s what I say.” 

He rolled his eyes and focused on playing with the small stone. Nothing came out of his mouth and she supplied the words for him instead. 

“You… you liked Hyunjin, didn’t you?” 

“What does it matter to you?”

“You’re not really denying it, so I’m assuming it’s true,” she deduced and Minho simply brushed her off with a breath. “Look, I get how you feel about Hyunjin now, but it doesn’t mean you should prevent him from doing the things he wants to do. He’s his own person, and you should respect that.” 

Balling his hands into fists, he said, “You don’t get the relationship Hyunjin and I have. There are a lot of things you don’t know, and it’s absolutely rude for you to be intruding in our personal life, as if you haven’t already been doing so.” 

“Just say you had an unrequited relationship and go.”

“Excuse me?” 

“I’m guessing I’m right once again,” she said, chalking up one point on her board, and none on Minho’s. “For real, you really have to stop not denying things because it makes it so much easier for other people to read you.” 

“Oh, and you feel like you’ve read me?”

She shrugged and simply said, “I’m an English teacher; it’s literally what I do.” 

He shook his head and smirked at her, showing her some teeth in that blabbing mouth. “I don’t like Hyunjin—not anymore, at least, but that doesn’t mean I can’t worry about him and not care about him at all.”

“I see that you care, I really do; but if you truly love him as your friend, you should let him spread his wings and fly.”

He shook his head again and placed his hands behind his back, leaving the stone way behind them. “Letting him spread his wings and letting him fly’s led us back here to Verona, which I’m sure will just end up in more heartbreak for him. It’s nothing short of disappointing.”

“You know, we won’t really know the outcome of this entire thing unless we actually try. There’s a realist point of view for you.” 

It was at that moment that he chose to smile a little bit, but not without adding a smirk right after. Smiling looked good on him. “Fair point. What do you want now?”

“Nothing else.” She almost bumped into the building when she realized they were at the hotel. They entered the building and ended up at the lobby, where barely anyone was. It was already late in the nighttime, and people were probably asleep. “Are you headed to your room?” 

“Stalker much?”

Her upper lip tugged up as she started judging him ever so harshly. “I’m just trying to be polite.”

Shrugging and going ahead, saluting her with two fingers with his back to her, he said, “It’s not going to work on me, Lee Byeol. See you tomorrow.” 

She was about to pull all her hair out. It wasn’t gonna work on him? What in the ever living god was he talking about? Just thinking about him made her want to punch the wall, and she’d only met his rude ass today. 

In any case, she went up to her hotel room and changed into a simple white oversized shirt and black leggings, prepping herself to sleep. She brushed her teeth and after that, got under the covers and turned off the lamp. It was time to go off to dreamland. 

It was about an hour into the night when she realized that she couldn’t sleep because she was too excited to. She groaned and hefted her own body out of bed, swinging her legs off and turning the lamp back on. It was already eleven thirty and she desperately needed some rest if she wanted to be chipper the very next day. Instead of going back to sleep, however, she decided to drag herself to the elevator and take herself up to the rooftop pool.

It was something to be expected from a hotel pool. The pool was elevated around five feet from the ground and bathroom-tile-looking tiles surrounded the entire unit. There was a smattering of pool chairs and huge red, yellow, and blue umbrellas here and there, and one chair near the pool was already occupied by a person with a book on their face. 

The one thing that caught her eye, however, were the stars. You couldn’t get this kind of view back in Korea, because most of the time, the sky was polluted with smog and overall dirty air. Here in Italy, however, the stars and the moon were in full view, their lights reflecting against the cool and clear pool water. She decided to close her eyes and drink in the moonlight and starlight when a certain someone disturbed her peace.

“Fuck off, nuisance.”

Her head whipped towards the person with the book on his face, but the book on the face was no more. It was in Minho’s hand now, a look of conceit and a curl of the lip targeted right at her. 

“Why don’t you?” she jabbed, trying to hold on to whatever sense of tranquility she had. Unfortunately, everything was gone. 

“I was here first.”

“I was here second.”

“What the fuck is that even supposed to mean?” 

“It means you can go back to your room and let me enjoy the rest of my night. In peace, by the way.”

He rolled his eyes and slapped his book down on the pool chair. “It’s never too late to turn back and head back to your own room, too. Go on, little one, head back to mommy and daddy now.” 

Her eyes narrowed into slits as she stomped over to him and sat her pissed off ass down on the chair beside him. “Do you have daddy issues or is it just me?”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

“Again with the evasive replies,” she said, clearly exasperated. She crossed her arms, pouted, and sat back in her chair. “What do you know about parents anyway? You’re probably some rich kid living off of daddy’s money and not giving a single care about life and those who live it.” 

Minho blew a raspberry with his lips and leaned against his knees. “I’m much more than that, thank you very much.” 

“Enlighten me.” 

“No thanks.”

She groaned and facepalmed herself, prompting a small laugh from him. At this time of the night, her hazy head found that a little hot. Just a little. Dismissing the thought, she simply said, “If you won’t tell me your life story, then I’ll tell you mine instead.”

“Wasn’t really asking, to be honest.” 

“That’s okay, I’ll tell you anyway.” She could practically feel the small smile creep up his lips as she continued. “I’m an English teacher with nowhere to go. I’ve lost my passion for it and I don’t know how to continue teaching if I stay this way. Life without passion is just…”

“…nothing?” he supplied. “I can get with that.” 

“Wasn’t really asking, to be honest,” she retorted, and they shared the smallest of laughs. It really suited him and maybe, just maybe, she was starting to think that he was actually pretty handsome in this light. That, or she was just tired out of her mind. “But yes, you’re right. What’s the point in teaching if you’re not interested in it anymore?”

He shrugged and leaned back in his lounge chair, propping up his head on his fist. “You could always find a new passion. You could relive an old one, or you can relearn the one you have now. It’s hard, I know, but you have to persevere.” 

“Look at you, giving me life advice. Are you the same Minho I just met this morning?” 

“I told you, I can get with losing your passion and shit like that. I know how it feels.” 

“Oh, do you?” 

A loud “tch” came out of his mouth and he sighed. He then launched into his own story. “I’m a dancer, and so is Hyunjin; we’re in the same dance troupe. I’ve been dancing for more than fifteen years now and though I love it with all my heart, I can’t say I’ve never lost interest in it. There was a time when I had to choose between dancing and running my dad’s business—yes, yes, fuck off and shut up—and to be honest, I was definitely leaning towards the latter because I lost my passion for the former.”

“I’m guessing you run your dad’s business now?” she asked.

“Yeah, I do,” he replied with a tiny smile on his face. “And I’m still in the same dance troupe.” 

All she could muster was a short yet amazed “wow”. It was rare that someone, anyone, could find the balance between their real passion and making money. Sometimes they would be lucky and that they would overlap, but that was one in a million. She was just glad that Minho was able to find that middle ground. 

Confirming her thoughts, Minho went on another tangent. “So I get you when you say that you’ve lost your passion. I lost interest in it when I was around twenty because I wasn’t making as much as I wanted to out of it, then I realized passion wasn’t always about money. Sometimes it’s being reckless and following your dreams, no matter what happens in the end.”

“You call that reckless? I call that hopeful.” 

“It’s dangerous, though,” he confessed. “That’s why I don’t want Hyunjin to push through with this sort of thing. He’ll pursue it but what if it ends in disappointment? What if he ends up spiraling into depression again?” 

“That’s not for you to decide,” she said truthfully, trying her best to console him, though it was but an effort. “Hyunjin can do whatever he wants in his own life, and he’ll feel what he feels. It may end up in sadness, but what’s another obstacle in life, right?” 

It took a few moments of silence before Minho replied, the same huffy look on his face. “Not sure if he can handle it.” 

She shrugged as she looked straight at his face and said, “That’s what friends are for, Minho, and you’re not doing a very good job of making them.” 

A loud “psh” came out of his mouth as he picked up his book and absentmindedly started to fidget with and flip through the pages without even looking at it. “You could just say I’m misunderstood.”

“You definitely are, though,” she said truthfully. “It’s not every day that you come across a rude yet misunderstood ass like you.” 

“Did you just half-curse at me?” 

“Just pretend you didn’t hear that.”

“Sorry, can’t.” 

She rolled her eyes and mustered up an “ugh”, which prompted a laugh from Minho. Again, she found this one pretty hot. God, she was a fool. “So, you liked Hyunjin, huh?”

“That’s a story for another time, nuisance,” he said, standing up from his seat with a puff of breath and taking his book with him, the old Minho finally returning from hibernation. “I’m already tired and we have a _long_ day tomorrow.” 

“You’re really just going to leave me hanging here?”

He stretched and yawned like a cat, and in between these, he said, “Sort of edging you a little bit. Makes it all the more fun.” 

“You’re gross.” 

He blew another raspberry with his mouth and started walking, but not without ruffling her hair and destroying whatever kind of hairstyle she did that morning. She strongly disliked it when people did that to her, especially when guys do it. This, however, was a little heartwarming coming from an ill-mannered person like him. “Let’s go to sleep, nuisance. I’ll see you later.” 

And with that, her sleep went undisturbed. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I made Minho a little less mean in this version of the story because I found that he was a little bit too harsh in the first version of this story hehe he's still mean, though. : D You'll get to know him more as the story progresses, but here he is, for the very first time!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 3!! This one's a long one, but for good reason??? HAHAHA I wrote the epilogue for this fic about three days ago, and it was about,,,, 11k words long,,,, so wait for that, I guess??? I'll just see how this one does, and I'll see if I'd want to post the epilogue ehehe in any case, enjoy this chapter! There's a lot that happens here, and it might give you whiplash,,,,

She was having brunch in the hotel garden the next day when someone pulled up a chair beside her and sat down. Almost instantly, she avoided his gaze and kept eating her caprese salad and toast, trying to drown out the sound of his voice, but try as she may, she couldn’t. 

“I couldn’t get any sleep last night thanks to you,” Minho said, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. “If I fall asleep behind the wheel, I’m telling the police that you caused the accident.” 

“Not like you can speak Italian anyway,” she said before stuffing her face with even more salad and trying to tune him out. The problem was that he had way too powerful a voice to block, and she wished that it was easier for her. “Plus, your polo shirt’s inside out.” 

“What?” he almost yelled as he looked down at his shirt, panicking and trying to find the tag. When he finally came to, he glared at her. “It’s not inside out.” 

“I know.” 

“You really are a nuisance.”

She shrugged as she kept eating the last of her toast and left Minho to his silence. He was about to open his mouth, and she interjected and said, “Do you never shut up?” 

A smug ran across his face as he pointed behind her, where Hyunjin was standing, smiling his best smile at her. “Glad you two are getting along as expected,” he said as he sat down across from her. “Are you guys ready?”

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” she confessed, and she stuffed the remaining piece of bread in her mouth, preparing herself to leave. 

“Do you guys think he’ll remember me?” Hyunjin suddenly asked, anxiously fidgeting with his fingers. “That’s my one fear.” 

“Well, I’m definitely hoping so,” Minho said, and Hyunjin and Byeol looked at each other in shock and confusion. Minho, instead, shrugged as his face retracted into his neck. “What? There’s some room for hopefulness.” 

Maybe her words got through to him somehow. Maybe, just maybe, he was starting to see the light. “I’m hoping so, too,” she said. “If he doesn’t, what do you think you’ll do?” 

“Probably sit in the corner and cry my eyes out—I’m kidding!” Hyunjin said with a grin. “I’ll just reintroduce myself and see if he’s still the same old Felix that I know.” 

Minho simply nodded once and crossed his arms, leaning back in his tiffany chair. Smug as he looked, his previous words seemed to betray the Minho she knew just a day ago. It was character development, and she loved seeing that kind of thing not just in books, but also in real life. 

“Alright, let’s go,” Hyunjin said, standing up from his seat with the rest following suit. Byeol set her napkin down on the table and left, just trailing a little bit behind the two boys. They exited the building and she was soon face-to-face with a red three-door Mini Cooper, two blue stripes stretching from the hood up to the bottom of the windshield, and she immediately just wondered how rich these two were to be renting a car of that caliber. That, and affording a detour to Verona from Rome. She got into the backseat and set her satchel down beside her and got her phone out to message Jeongin, considering that she wasn’t able to last night because she was so damn tired. 

“ _Bruh, just met these two who responded to my letter,_ ” she started. “ _We’re going on an adventure to see Felix. Talk to you when we get there_.” She pressed send and leaned back in her seat just as Grumpy revved up the engine and started to roll out of the driveway. 

Verona really was the most beautiful of cities. It was small, practically countryside, yet it was where she found peace and quiet from everything turbulent that she had inside her head. As they rolled on and curved side-to-side on the roads, she took in the views of orchards and trees, considering herself lucky just to be witnessing something as alluring as Italy. She practically pressed her face against the car window trying to get a clearer look at the greenery, admiring it as something she wouldn’t see back in the city in Korea. She would definitely miss this when she goes back. 

Breaking her from her thoughts, Hyunjin spoke up. “So, Byeol, what do you do for a living?” 

Her face lit up when he asked, remembering her conversation with Minho just last night. “I’m an English teacher back in Seoul,” she said. “I’ve been a teacher for about seven years now.” 

“Did you learn English just from studying?” 

She shook her head. “My dad’s American, so I learned English at a very young age. It’s my second language, basically.” 

“That’s why you look a little bit western,” Hyunjin observed. “I didn’t know that about you.” 

“It’s alright; I get that a lot,” she confessed, a shy smile on her face. “What brings you guys to Italy, by the way?”

Minho looked at her from behind the wheel and the rearview mirror, narrowing his eyes at her as Hyunjin racked his brain for an answer. 

“Minho’s dad actually sent us to Rome and the countryside on a mission to find the best tasting wine here in Italy,” he explained. “I don’t know if Minho told you on a whim or anything, but he runs his dad’s distillery back in Korea, so you could say Minho’s an alcoholic.” 

Byeol let out a puff of air, the ghost of a laugh. “I’m not surprised.” 

“Duly. Noted.” Minho kept his eyes on the road but she noticed that his hands tightened on the wheel. Maybe another thing they could possibly talk about?

“So how long are you guys planning on staying here?” Byeol asked.

“Around three weeks,” Hyunjin said, and she desperately wished she wasn’t sat beside Minho on the flight back home, considering that they may or may not have booked the same plane. “We were on a tight schedule, but I’m still glad that we managed a detour to here.” 

“Have you guys found the wine yet?” she asked, curious.

“Nope,” Minho said, turning into a curve once again. “We have time, though. Don’t miss us too much.” 

Byeol gagged in the backseat, and Hyunjin laughed loudly at her, clapping his hands. 

The rest of the ride turned out to be just Hyunjin and Minho bickering about their friends back home, and how to find the wine back in the city of Verona while she simply dealt with Jeongin trying to contain his excitement about the journey to Felix. She told him about the annoying animal that was Minho, but she left out the part where they had a small heart-to-heart talk, considering that Jeongin was one to jump to conclusions easily. 

Finally, they pulled up to a fenced part in the countryside. Beyond the barricade was a large spot of grass, probably a soccer field’s worth, which was a stark contrast to the dirt they passed by just a few moments ago. There was a small cabin with a wraparound patio beyond the grassy area looking almost antique yet still standing strong. They parked the car under the shade of a tree in front of the fence and pushed through, walking on the plush foliage that Hyunjin just called the dance area.

“I thought dancing areas were supposed to be about wooden floors and mirrors and ballet bars,” she said kind of instinctively. “The kids at our university usually dance in studios.” 

Minho pocketed his hands and smiled brightly, the first time she’d ever seen him this way. “I’m guessing this is where you learned how to dance without looking at a mirror, huh?”

Hyunjin nodded and then looped his arm around Byeol’s, something that she thought was really comforting and telling of how Hyunjin was being really friendly towards her, something that Minho really wasn’t. “Dancing without a mirror taught me a lot, really; it taught me how to build up my self-esteem, how to move more fluidly, how to trust my instincts. It was a really good learning experience and, as I told you guys, I wouldn’t trade it for the world.” 

Byeol simply smiled and said, “Looks like you’re really fond of this place.” 

As if his head was about to fall from his neck, he nodded violently as they reached the front door. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes tightly, and knocked on the glass door. It was really concerning how impulsive Hyunjin was—let’s be real, Byeol, too—but it was admirable how far he would go for the person he really loved. 

There was no answer at first, but then the blinds went straight up and out came a blond man who, very much, looked like a squirrel with its cheeks full of acorns. That, or a quokka. It looked like he was eating his lunch and was just disturbed by the three of them. 

“ _Jisung?_ ” Hyunjin said aloud in astonishment, but with the widest of smiles. “Jisung, is that you?” 

The blond man who was apparently Jisung rubbed his eyes and squinted, swallowing the remnants of his food. “Hwang Hyunjin?” he said, incredulous, opening the door and spreading his arms out for Hyunjin to hug him. “Hwang Hyunjin, what are you doing here?!”

The taller of them laughed as he scooped up his old friend into a hug. “Jisung, oh, I’ve missed you so much!” 

“Don’t give me that shit!” he said back after releasing Hyunjin, punching his friend on the shoulder. “How have you been?” 

“Still alive, but I’ve been better,” he replied. He then gestured at Minho and Byeol. “By the way, these are my friends, Lee Minho and Lee Byeol.” 

“Why’d you bring a married couple with you?” 

A shocked Lee Byeol coughed for a solid five seconds as if something got caught in her throat, and she supposed something did, which was her remaining respect for herself.Minho snorted and just looked at her pathetically. “Oh, god, you have no idea,” she said after catching her breath. “We’re not married; we literally just met yesterday.” 

“Ah, so, soon-to-be married, then,” Jisung said with a grin that reached his eyes. She just looked away and scratched the back of her neck in embarrassment. “Anyway, what are you doing here? I haven’t seen you in ages! Why didn’t you tell me you were coming? I’m only a text away.” 

“Slow down, boy,” Hyunjin said. “I came here on a very important mission.”

Jisung’s head cocked to the right as he faced his friend with a confused expression. “What’s that?” 

Taking a deep breath, Hyunjin said, “I’ve come to see Felix.” 

As if he was disappointed—maybe he was, really—he clicked his tongue and looked at his shoes, rocking back and forth on his heels. “Oh, Hyunjin, you don’t know?” 

“Oh no,” Minho whispered under his breath, preparing himself for the worst. Oh no, indeed. 

“Know… what?” Hyunjin said expectantly as he inevitably dropped his grin.

“It’s been almost ten years since Felix left for Australia,” Jisung said sadly, and she could practically cut the palpable sadness in his tone with a knife. “He found out the news about your parents when he came home from the airport, and he was totally heartbroken. Some people here haven’t seen or heard from him ever since.” 

Byeol could’ve sworn she heard Hyunjin’s heart drop to his stomach. There was silence that was shared among the four of them, so Byeol made the decision to pursue the situation further. “Do you have any sort of contact with him? Maybe a phone number or an address?” 

Jisung shook his head, still balancing on the backs of his feet. “The cellphone number I used to call went out of service a few years back. I never really had the chance to leave this place because I was handling all the dance and vocal classes here, so I can’t really say that I’ve had contact with him in recent time.” 

“What about an address?” Minho asked worriedly. “The nuisance here’s a Secretary of Juliet; maybe she can send him a letter.” 

Ignoring what had just come out of Minho’s mouth, she rolled her eyes exasperatedly and said, “Anything would be really helpful.” 

“Hmm,” Jisung hummed. He looked lost in thought as he retreated into his cavern and searched for something in his wooden drawers, finally producing a blue piece of lined paper with scribbles written on the back. He returned to them and handed the sheet to Hyunjin, who examined it. “This is the record from ten years ago. Try and see if the address still works.”

She peered over Hyunjin’s shoulders, standing on her tippy toes, and read the record from a house in Sydney, Australia. A sinking feeling spread throughout her body when she read where Felix lived because the letter most likely wouldn’t make it in time, even if they wrote him this very day. There was a possibility that Chan and the others could send the reply back to them back in Korea, but what good will that exactly do? It was unclear if Felix could go to Korea to meet up with Hyunjin, too. The most they could do was keep writing to each other, but Hyunjin went to Verona to see Felix in the flesh. It was all really confusing to think about it, and Hyunjin wasn’t exempted from it, either.

“Sydney, Australia?” he said, albeit disappointingly. “That’s so far from where we live…” 

“We could write to him, Hyunjin,” Minho suggested, but Byeol shook her head.

“The letter won’t make it in time before you guys leave for Rome and home,” she supplied. “And even then, can Felix go to Korea?” 

Hyunjin was silenced by how much mental gymnastics he had to do in order to figure out how to handle the situation. “I don’t have enough money to go to Sydney, either.” 

“Money won’t be a problem,” Minho said, crossing his arms, his face absolutely serious. So he _did_ have a single good bone in his body. 

The tallest of them sighed and rubbed his right temple. “I’ll… try and figure out what to do.” He faced Jisung with the smallest of smiles and patted his shoulder. “Thanks for this, Jisung, it really means a lot.”

Jisung saluted him one last time before saying, “Don’t make yourself a stranger, alright? Message me if you can.” 

Hyunjin could only muster up a nod and a half-assed smile as they crossed the huge patch of grass to go back to the car. Minho was absolutely worried about his best friend as they continued their journey back to the hotel, subtly looking to his right every time he passed a turn. Hyunjin, on the other hand, was completely silent on the way back, probably lost in his thoughts and saddened by the way things went today. She couldn’t even bicker with Minho properly when all he could do was be silent and pick at his lips. 

Finally, they reached the hotel, and Hyunjin got out of the car without a single word. They parked the car and followed him back into the hotel before he said, “Guys, I think I need a minute or two alone.” He didn’t even wait for their answers and simply dragged his body towards the elevator, shoulders slumped.

“Great,” Minho said, rubbing both of his temples with one hand. “I knew this was going to turn out badly.” 

“We tried,” Byeol said, unsure of the words she spat out instinctively. 

“What’s the use in trying if it ends up in heartbreak?” he said, walking quickly out of the hotel, abandoning her in the middle of the gold and bronze lobby. It was only after a few seconds that she thought she should follow him. 

She found him angrily kicking a rock—a bigger one this time—walking towards the plaza near the hotel. It was a huge area centered around a huge marble fountain with a statue of a woman clothed in a chiton in the middle, and the stalls around it, she saw, sold fruits, vegetables, and flowers. A large thing, it really was, because there were still several buildings behind the kiosks, the place dotted with condominiums and old architecture such as the small church in the far back. He settled down on the fountain, sitting on the rim and whispering furiously to himself. 

She sighed and looked around her, spotting a stall just a few meters to her right. It wasn’t just an ice cream stall, apparently, because it was filled with six different flavors of pure gelato goodness. She ordered two separate cups of mint chocolate chip ice cream as it was her favorite, paid and thanked the man who was selling it, and walked over to Grumpy by the fountain.

Offering him the ice cream by sticking her hand out to his face, she said, “Cheer up, loser.” 

He took one disgusted look at her and then to the ice cream even though he snatched it from her hand anyway and started stabbing the spoon into the gelato ever so softly. Still irate, however. She sat down with a small noise and started eating from her own cup, crossing her legs and not even looking at him. She simply watched the pigeons in front of the church and the kids that were playing with them, though she quickly got bored when she saw the fourth kid trip and fall to the ground trying to chase the birds. 

“Things could’ve turned out way differently,” he said through a mouthful of gelato.

She snorted and chastised him. “Don’t talk with your mouth full.” 

“What’s it to you?” he said, still through a mouthful of gelato, though the threat was empty. He swallowed the remaining food and stuck the spoon straight down into the cup. “Things could have turned out differently yet they didn’t, and my best friend has to deal with heartbreak once again. Why does this thing keep happening to him?” 

Groaning, she said, “Minho, you can’t keep trying to control how things go; that’s not how life works. There’s no sense to how things happen but we have to live through them, and at the same time change. When we do change, we become better versions of ourselves and come out on top.”

“How exactly does pain make you a better person, hmm? All it does is drag you down until you can’t see anything anymore.”

She shrugged and it took her a while to answer his question. “Pain is just an obstacle, and the meaning of strength is to persevere through any obstacle. Do you think jumping over a hurdle brings you back to the starting line? Do you think pulling back the string on that bow doesn’t mean it’s going to send an arrow flying? Perseverance is the secret to getting through anything.” 

“There’ll come a time when I’ll be too tired to persevere, and what happens then?” he scoffed, stuffing his mouth with gelato once again. 

“You die.” 

“Excuse me?”

“The moment you stop trying, you die,” she said simply. “Doesn’t matter if you die in real life or you die on the inside; you just die. What do you think happens after death?”

He shrugged. “Don’t think anything happens, really. Why?” 

“Then you end your life by stopping yourself from persevering,” she explained. “It’s really that easy. You get over it or you don’t; you live or you die. The important thing is that there’s good to be fought for in this world, no matter how hard it is to find it, and you, Lee Minho, are fighting the good fight for Hyunjin. I can tell.” 

Minho blew out a sigh as he slurped the last of his mint chocolate chip ice cream and set it down beside him. “How’d you know?” 

“How’d I know what?” 

“That mint chocolate is my second favorite.” 

“I really didn’t,” she confessed, a little bit surprised. “A lot of people think it tastes like toothpaste, but I think they’re wrong.” 

“It tastes better than that, really.”

She chuckled, clearly happy at how things turned out. “Glad to know we agree on something for once.”

Minho sent her a chuckle back, and she quickly received it. It was a short while before they were able to say anything to each other, though a person disturbed that shared comfort.

“Excuse me, do you know how to get to Hotel del Cielo?” a man with dark brown hair and a comma hairstyle asked the two of them in accented English. She couldn’t really place her finger on what kind of accent it was, so she decided to drop it. “I seem to be lost.”

Her face brightened up as she stood to face the baby-faced angel and look him in the eye. “What a great coincidence! We were just about to head back to the hotel, too. We’ll take you there.” 

“Really? Thank you so much!” he said, clearly excited as his eyes turned into crescents. It was really strange for a man of his age to be travelling alone with just a map in his hands and a backpack strapped to his body. The clothes he was wearing looked like they weren’t suited for Italian weather, considering that he wore a striped sweater underneath a black short-sleeved polo, paired with black jeans and flat-heeled sneakers. It was almost a disaster, really, if it weren’t for his visuals, flawless diction, and ocean deep voice. 

She grabbed at Minho’s polo shirt and tugged upwards to bring him to his feet, but not before grabbing his empty cup and stumbling in Byeol’s direction. “What are you doing? I can’t speak proper English.” 

“He’s just asking for us to take him back to the hotel and we’re helping him out. Don’t be such a sourpuss.” 

“‘Us?’ ‘We?’” 

“Shut up and go with it.” She looked back to the young man and beamed at him, and he smiled right back at her. She stayed back to match his footsteps and to talk with him. “Sorry, that was kind of rude. I forgot to ask what your name was.”

“S’alright,” he said, putting her at ease. “My name’s Lix. What’s yours?”

“I’m Byeol,” she said, sticking out her hand for a handshake, and he easily took it, shaking her hand with a firm yet relaxed grip. “What brings you to Verona?” 

“Uh, that’s a difficult question to answer,” he said with the shiest of smiles and the most nervous of laughs. “I came here to visit a friend after about nine or ten years of not being here.”

She nodded throughout his reason and said, “That’s a very long time. Why’d you stay away for that long?” 

He simply shrugged. “There were just too many complications, I guess.”

Nodding and not wanting to pursue the question further, she pointed at the golden plaque on the building that said the name of the hotel. “Well, we’re here,” she announced cheerily. “Hope you have a nice stay here.” 

“Thanks!” he said, his eye smile appearing once again. “See you around!” 

She waved goodbye to Lix as she looped her arm around Minho’s, the ill-tempered boy acting all repulsed by her, trying to free his arm from her grasp. Thankfully, she had the strength to match. “He was cute,” she commented.

“Get off me.” 

“No.” She dragged him around the lobby until she spotted something in the corner of her eye. There was a sign on a three-legged stand that said “Ballroom for the Elderly”, and she immediately got an idea, starting to pull him towards the hall. “You said you liked dancing, right?” 

It took him a few seconds to reply, and when he saw the sign, he began to protest and get away from her. “Lee Byeol, I’m going to say this once and never again: let go of me or I will kill you.” 

“I can die. It was a good run. Besides, it gives us something to do while Hyunjin’s sulking around,” she said with the sweetest of smiles as she pulled open the ballroom door with one hand, clutching Grumpy with the other. He managed to free himself for a little bit until she grabbed his hand and pulled him towards her again, finally entering the hall.

It looked to Byeol that the ceiling was about a hundred feet above them, while the widthand length of the floor was a little bit less than that. The floor-to-ceiling windows were covered with red velvet curtains, and the marble floors were waxed to death. The room was filled with elderly people of various ages, their bodies happily swaying and dancing to the rhythm of a muffled twenties-era dance tune. The host on the stage was trying to motivate the crowd, and it was working, to her delight. It was absolutely cheerful inside the room, except for the space reserved for the gremlin beside her.

“I am not dancing to this,” he said, already turning away.

“What’s wrong with a little tap of the feet?” she said, blocking him from going outside. 

“I dance to hip-hop music; not to some oldies music that makes me want to gag,” he retorted and placed his hands on his hips. “Besides, I never learned ballroom dancing. That shit’s for losers.” 

She pouted, kind of offended by the fact that she’d taken ballroom classes when she was younger, and she pretty much enjoyed it. “Mean,” she huffed. “Just thought it would be fun.” 

He took one annoyed look at her, staring down at her. Minho looked like the scariest and meanest person when he opened his mouth and spoke, but his looks kind of betrayed his own personality, considering that he had a young and fresh look to him, looking like he was younger and nicer than he really was. He sucked in air through his lips and sighed, walking towards one corner of the ballroom, but not without tugging on her hand and bringing her there with him. “I hate you,” he said as a smile crept up her face. “Don’t give me that stupid look, Lee Byeol.”

“What stupid look? I don’t know what you’re talking about.” 

A couple of heads were already turning their way, and she was glad that Minho took a spot near the corner because less people would be noticing them that way. In fairness, the older people who were looking at them were smiling big smiles, probably amused that a younger couple was joining in on the fun. Minho, on the other hand, looked utterly confused on where to put his hands, so she supplied the right moves for him. 

“You’ve never done this kind of thing, have you?” she said as she placed one of his hands on her waist and held the other one up with hers. Minho was quiet, then she gasped and came to a realization. “You’ve never danced with a partner, have you?”

“No!” he almost yelled, his expression one of shock. “I mean, no, I’ve danced with someone; it’s just been so long since I’ve done this.”

“What, like ten years? If I’ve learned anything from this trip, it’s that ten years is never too late,” she said smugly as she started to sway to and fro with the music, while Grumpy was still struggling with how to move his hips to the beat. “Come on, you dummy. Just move!” 

Minho sucked in a breath, looking to the sky, and groaned. Finally coming to his senses, he went with the flow and the rhythm, carrying himself with the dignity of a dancer who had more than fifteen years under his belt, but with the two left feet of a newborn deer. She laughed behind closed lips as he slowly but surely learned how to dance like the elderly. 

“There you go,” she said to encourage him.

“Ugh, this feels like I’m betraying every principle I’ve ever had,” he said under his breath.

“You’re exaggerating,” she scolded as she led him to dance a little bit livelier. He seemed to be relaxing since he followed her. The music shifted a little bit, from the usual chippy tune to an even chippier one. She laughed as she lifted his arm and quickly spun herself around, turning back to Minho who had an incredulous expression painted all over his face. His features then softened as he spun her around one more time, and spun her in the other direction, and then finally bringing her close to his body, so close that they actually touched chests. 

He wiggled his eyebrows as she stared at him with the weirdest of faces, not knowing how to react to how he just caught her like that. “Let it be known that this is how I lure people in,” he said smugly, and Byeol pretended to gag, which made Minho’s eyebrows move around even more.

“God, I thought that the spinning was going to make me vomit, but no, it’s just you,” she said as she stifled the very much real urge to puke. She pulled herself away just as the music slowed and the lights turned down, and all the elderly couples seemed to pull their bodies closer together, the atmosphere turning mellow and sweet. She took one look at Minho as her eyes widened and her head shook side-to-side violently. “No way. No, no, no.” 

It was Minho’s turn to place Byeol’s hands on him, even though she verbally and physically protested to what was happening. She groaned as she started slowly rocking her hips left to right to the slow and steady beat, all without looking at Minho’s face, which she knew would be holding a confident expression right about now.

In an unexpected turn of events, Minho slid a finger under her chin and pushed her face upwards to look at him, and it was a never-before-seen Minho expression that she saw plastered on his face. It was a soft yet sultry look, his eyes practically blazing and his lips curved up into a smirk. She knew she would buckle at the knees if she kept staring at him without saying anything, so she tried to croak out something, anything. 

“So this is how you play with your victims, huh?” she managed.

“Is it working?”

“Do you want it to work?”

Minho shrugged with a complacent look on his face. “Maybe, maybe not.” 

She rolled her eyes at his reply and continued to sway to the music, even if she felt a little bit revulsed, a little bit scared of how fast she was starting to look at Minho as an attractive fellow and not just the annoying hothead she met just yesterday. 

The music died down just in time for her to reevaluate her stupid feelings for him, and they eventually pulled away from each other. “I’m gonna need a drink,” Minho said as he started towards the door, seemingly desperate for alcohol. 

“God, yes,” she said, needing alcohol, too. 

They made their way silently towards the dining area, where a number of wooden tables and chairs were sat, with a quartet on an elevated stage playing some love ballad that she forgot the title to. Beyond that was the secluded area that housed the bar, a million varieties of spirits and wines just standing in rows behind the bartender. They took seats beside each other on the bar instead of the dining area and ordered their respective drinks, with Minho ordering a screwdriver and Byeol ordering a glass of rosé wine. 

“Pussy,” he mumbled as he took the first swig of his orange drink.

“Right back at you,” she said as she sipped from hers. It tasted like late nights in Korea, with her stressfully checking papers, a glass in her hand. “So, about Hyunjin…”

“Will you ever stop sticking your nose in my private life?” he said as he took a big gulp of his drink, dropping it to almost half. Huh. Every time she mentioned him liking Hyunjin, he seemed to tense up.

To this, Byeol simply rolled her eyes and said, “You promised me the story for another time, and this is that time.”

“Get me drunk enough and I’ll consider telling you.” 

“God knows that’s not going to happen,” she said with conclusiveness. “I’m sure you’re one of those with a high tolerance for alcohol. Then there’s me, who turns red after just one strong drink.”

He chuckled, but it was a little lifeless. A silent moment was shared between them as he sighed and put down his drink, starting, “Hyunjin and I have been friends since the end of high school—just a short while after he met Felix—and I started to like him when we were in uni. I never really considered liking him until I started dancing in the same dance group as him.”

“Was it love at first dance?” 

He snorted at the thought, though he looked somewhat uneasy, somewhat nervous. He started to fidget with his fingers, too, and it was something she’d never seen him do before. Maybe he was tensing up again? “Me? Believe in that shit?”

“You never know,” she replied.

“I really wish it were, though,” he confessed. “That way, I could’ve dismissed it as simple attraction and not…”

Her lips turned down as she supplied the word for him. “…love?” 

Showing no emotion at all, he sipped from his drink, not answering back. A moment later, he responded. “I wanted to confess to him, but I knew he had someone else in mind, and he made that crystal clear when we started getting closer. He told me about Felix a while back, and I knew that I wouldn’t be the one for him.”

“Does… does Hyunjin know how you feel about him?”

He nodded, swirling his drink around. “At this point, I’m pretty sure he knows and he’s learned how to work around it,” he said, albeit sadly. “How pathetic, right? Never really confessed to the first guy I ever liked, yet he still turned me down.” 

She couldn’t come up with the words to say. It wasn’t really pathetic; it was more painful and heartbreaking. To have his heart broken by his first love… she thought it was just unimaginable, but here he was, evidence of just how love changes a person. Instead of coming up with an answer to his self-deprecation, she asked him a question. “How do you live like that? How can you live with him as your best friend after all this time?” 

He looked down at the drink in his hand, wiping his fingers on the condensation that had formed outside of the glass. “You just learn to get over it, I guess. Over time, the wound just heals, you change, and you become a better person because of it. I may or may not have died trying, but it looks like I resurrected myself from the ashes.”

“You know you don’t need a person by your side, right?” she said, and he seemed a little bit surprised, his eyebrows going all over the place again. “If you yourself are whole, then you just need to find a person that’ll complement you, not complete you.” 

He didn’t speak for what seemed like an eternity after he downed the rest of his drink and ordered another. She was a little bit shocked at how fast he went through his screwdriver, but she supposed it was what high tolerance drinkers do, especially when they had some issues. 

She drank from her glass once again and awkwardly sat there, trying her best to console him, even though he may not have needed it anymore. “It’s a painful situation, but I’m thankful you got yourself out of that rut.” 

He smirked just as the bartender set down his drink in front of him. “It was a learning experience,” he said. 

A period of silence was shared between them and she broke it by saying, “Hyunjin really loves Felix, doesn’t he?”

“More than any of us will ever know,” he said into his glass, drinking pretty much half of it again. Geez, was this what distillers did? “Also, you were wrong.” 

“Wrong about what?” 

“As soon as I get up from this seat, I’ll be dizzy as fuck and I’m going to need your help dragging my body to my room.” 

“ _What?_ ” she whisper-shouted as the panic slowly started to build up. “I can’t just leave you here! What’s your room number, you goddamn alcoholic?”

“Minho’s going to sleep now,” he said as he folded his arms on the counter and buried his face in them. “Goodnight.” 

She, again, was about to pull all her hair out. Taking a deep breath and closing her eyes, she tried to decide how she was going to go about this. She didn’t have Hyunjin’s number or any other information in order to contact him, and she couldn’t simply ask the concierge on where he stayed in, so there was only one way for her to take care of his drunk ass. 

With all the remaining strength she had left, she hoisted Minho’s right arm over her shoulder and started carrying his body towards her room. At least he was still able to stand up and walk a little bit. Otherwise, she would be dead trying to save him. 

“Y’know, yer sort of cute,” Minho slurred and she couldn’t help but roll her eyes exasperatedly as she pushed the button on the elevator. “Dint really notice it at first, but yer really cute, y’know that?”

“Of course I do,” she said sarcastically as she hauled him into the elevator and pressed her floor. “You can shut up now.” 

“No.” He made his point clear when he launched into another one. “Yer annoying.” 

“Yes.”

“And a nuisance.”

“Yes.” 

“But I think I’m sort of…”

“Don’t you say it.” 

“…into you.”

She let out the largest of sigh-groans as the elevator doors parted. Tugging on Minho once again, she brought him to her place just a few rooms down the hallway to the right, opening the door with her keycard and busting the door open with her foot. With a huff, she threw his body on the double bed and swung his legs over. She took off his shoes and his socks, all the while with him complaining about how cold it was. 

Patting his shoulder and sitting beside his bedside, she said, “You’re a piece of work, Lee Minho.” 

“I know,” he mumbled under the sheets, unable to find a comfortable enough position. Instead, he sat up with his eyes closed. “I can’t sleep.” 

“That’s because you haven’t tried it yet,” she said, trying to push him down into the bed, but the unspeakable happened. 

He quickly and forcefully tugged on the hand that was unsuccessfully shoving him to lie down, which caused her to move ever so swiftly and closely to him, so much so that he straightened her up by grabbing the sides of her face and planting his soft lips on hers. He tasted so much like like orange juice with a hint of vodka—the drink he just had. His cushiony lips were placed ever so gently on hers—he didn’t move at all—and it would’ve been the sweetest of kisses if it weren’t for his drunken state and how she was annoyed by him every single day. 

He released her from his grasp and stared at her face so… affectionately? He was beaming at her, which was a rare occasion, and his eyes were curving into an eye smile. She could definitely say it was one of the cutest ear-to-ear smiles she’d ever seen, but she came to her senses and cleared her throat, fixing her hair in embarrassment, and not knowing what else to do in that situation. “That was unexpected.” 

“And nice,” he supplied for her, even if someone would have to threaten her for her to admit it. He somewhat looked sober now, for some reason. “We can do it again if you’d like.” 

“Go to sleep, Minho,” was all she could say. 

“Not without you,” he said as he plopped down his head on the pillow, almost instantly falling asleep. 

Rolling her eyes, she grabbed a set of pajamas from the drawer in the closet and made a beeline for the bathroom to change and brush her teeth. Once she did so, she climbed into the bed but stayed a good distance from him, and she found herself falling asleep faster than she expected. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AAAAA what happened, Lee Minho??? HAHAHAHA


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short, but packs a punch. :^)

The days passed by ever so quickly, with her avoiding Minho at all costs. Luckily, she woke up that day without his arms around her, and she was more than thankful for that. She left him in the room and went back to the Secretaries HQ to tell them all about what had happened that past day, though she left out the part where the source of her irritation had kissed her drunkenly. She still didn’t know how to feel about that. 

Instead of staying cooped up in the hotel and stressing herself out by thinking about what happened, she decided to go to the famous tourist spots in Verona on her own, eating as much as ice cream as she could. God, she definitely needed to shred all the extra pounds off when she got home.

She took a little break from the city and went to the Giardano Gusti where she took so many shots of the garden and, of course, herself with the greenery. Jeongin would absolutely hate her if she didn’t. It was beautiful how the place looked anachronistic, and how time just seemed to stop in the place ever so solemnly with the best Renaissance gardens in Italy just surrounding her. 

There was also a day where she trudged to the Arena di Verona and had another cup of ice cream to herself. It was evident that she was still bothered by what happened when she absentmindedly shoved the sweet treat into her mouth. Did she really like him that way? I mean, sure, he was attractive—really attractive—but did her feelings for him change in such a short period of time? Wasn’t he gay, too? This really wasn’t like her, but—

“Byeol?” a familiar voice asked, and as she took one more bite of mint chocolate chip, she looked up from her seat and saw that it was Hyunjin who’d said her name. No sign of Minho, though. “I haven’t seen you in a long while.”

She got up from her seat and smiled at him. “I’ve been kind of busy travelling around,” she explained. “What about you? How’ve you been?”

“Oh, you know, just walking around to clear my head,” he said. “Mind if I join you?”

“No, not at all,” she said as she invited him to sit down with her. “Have you thought about what you wanted to do about Felix?”

He nodded. “I asked the Secretaries on what to do, so I wrote him a letter addressed to his house in Sydney. I’m still hoping he lives in the same address, but we’ll see. If all else fails, I’ll just save up some money to go to Sydney on my own.” 

“Ah, I see,” she said. “Here’s to hoping, I guess.”

Hyunjin smiled, his smile reaching his eyes. “Minho’s really supportive about it,” he said, speaking his thoughts. “I never thought he would go out of his way to be so helpful about it, but here he is.”

“He seems to have… changed a little bit.” 

“Minho’s just a little unpredictable,” he explained. “One minute he’s harsh and unlikeable, and the next, he’s talking to you about how strawberry is the best ice cream flavor of all.”

She chuckled. “I think I’ve seen that a little bit.” 

“Really? How?” 

She cleared her throat, not knowing whether to tell Hyunjin or not. She skirted around the topic instead. “We were talking about how we lost our passions once in our lives,” she narrated. “It seems like we both lost interest in what we did for the longest time, and we kind of shared a heart-to-heart conversation. It was the first time he was ever nice to me.” 

“That’s… really nice,” Hyunjin said. “He never really opened up to anyone about that. Maybe you’re something special.”

She laughed nervously, her eyes darting around and never landing on Hyunjin. “Has… has he said anything about me in the past few days?”

He mulled it over for a bit, stroking his fake beard and looking into the horizon. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I think he asked where you were once, but I think that was it. Why? Did something happen?”

Laughing worriedly once again, she fidgeted with her fingers below the table. “No, not really.”

“ _Byeol,_ ” he dragged, staring at her with one eyebrow raised. “He’s my best friend; any problem you have with him, you can tell me and I can keep it in full confidence. If anything, I can definitely talk to him about it if you feel uncomfortable tlaking about it with him.”

She decided to start it off with an easy one. “He got drunk a few days ago and I had to bring him back to my room.” 

“Huh,” Hyunjin said curiously. “It takes a lot for Minho to get drunk, and he doesn’t usually do that.” 

“What _._ ”

“Yeah, he has a high tolerance for alcohol,” Hyunjin continued. “I mean, he’s a distiller; it’s kind of what comes with the job.”

“ _What?_ ”

“What do you mean?”

Her eyes widened as she tried to process the facts and think about the night he kissed her. What exactly did Minho just do? He pretended to be drunk, but for what? Just so that he could kiss her? What—

“Byeol?” Hyunjin interrupted, touching her arm and effectively bringing her out from her thoughts. “Are you okay?”

“Uh… Is Minho gay by any chance?” she asked carefully, trying her hardest to pull herself together. If he was gay, then she would be dismissing the kiss because he was simply drunk and too intoxicated to think, but if he was…

“He’s bisexual.”

She almost fainted right then and there. “Oh my god, I’m going to die,” she said, lying back on her metal chair. 

“Byeol, use your words,” Hyunjin said slowly, trying to calm her down. “Tell me what’s going on.” 

She rubbed her temples and closed her eyes, knowing that the only way to go through all of this was to tell Hyunjin, even though she would forever be incriminating herself by confessing. “Let me start this off by saying that I did _not_ know that Minho would have a high tolerance for alcohol, considering that he looked like he was drunk after drinking one and a half screwdrivers.” 

“What?” Hyunjin said incredulously. “Why would he do that?”

“I don’t know!” she said as she threw her hands up in frustration. “I don’t know why he would pretend to be drunk before he decided to ruin my life by _kissing me_ , dear Lord Almighty in Heaven.” 

“ _What?_ ” It was a serious situation, but Hyunjin was having none of that, considering that what was plastered on his face was of pure joy and excitement. “He kissed you?”

“Hyunjin, this isn’t the time for celebrating!” she yelled a little too loudly, a few heads turning her way. “A kiss was just stolen from me without me knowing, and I was just taken advantage of. Hello? Does that not ring alarm bells?”

He suspended his cheerfulness and cleared his throat, composing himself by breathing in three breaths through his mouth. “Okay, okay, I get your apprehensions, Ms. Minho’s Future Wife,” he joked and Byeol just groaned loudly, “but I’m sure he has his reasons for kissing you and tricking you just like that. To me, it just sounds like Minho’s taken a liking to a certain someone after six years.”

“He has a very weird way of showing i—wait, what did you say? Six years?” 

Hyunjin nodded and said, “Yup, six years. That’s…” He trailed off, knowing what would come next, so Byeol just provided the words for him.

“That’s how long it’s been ever since he gave up on you,” she said carefully, and Hyunjin smiled a sad one. “But how is that possible? Doesn’t Minho have flings or one-night stands or anything like that?” 

A confused noise came out of Hyunjin’s mouth as he shrugged his shoulders and shook his head from side to side. “He doesn’t talk about his love life, and the last time he told me something about it, he was still in love with me, so…” 

“This is probably the most annoying and embarrassing thing that has ever happened in my life to date,” she said with finality, pulling down her cheeks in exasperation. “This kind of thing doesn’t happen to me; it should never happen to anyone. I wouldn’t wish this upon anyone at all.”

“You’re exaggerating,” he said and patted her arm. “It was just a kiss. It caused a lot of trouble, but that’s what it really is.” 

“Still embarrassing,” she said, trying to punctuate her point. As if her early evening couldn’t get any worse, a voice stopped her in her tracks.

“What’s embarrassing, nuisance?” 

She looked up, up, up, and towering over her was Minho looking all delicious and surprisingly bulky in his blue cotton sweater and tight-fitting black pants, his thumbs slid into his pockets and a look of disgust painted across his face. She knew she shouldn’t think about him that way, but it was almost inevitable after what had happened between them, even after she’d convinced herself she wasn’t that type of girl. Still, he made her heart do somersaults inside her chest and alarm bells blare inside her head. 

Hyunjin couldn’t stifle his smile, so he tried standing up and said, “I’m going back to the—“

“No, no,” she insisted, beating Hyunjin to it, “I’m going back to the hotel. On my own. Yes. I’ll leave you two here.” 

“No, I—“

“Geez, Hyunjin, just let her leave,” Minho said, physically waving her off. She really was this close to treating him like a punching bag, but years of teaching taught her that you only have patience when there are too many witnesses. 

“Sure, but only after she finishes what she has to say,” Hyunjin said in a rush as he ran his fastest in the direction of the hotel, panting like a dog, fading out from her vision until he was just a tiny black spot. 

Minho took one look at Hyunjin’s disappearing figure and then right back at her. “Do you have a reason as to why my best friend just ran away from us like that?” 

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” she mumbled under her breath as she slung her satchel over her shoulder and trudged towards the hotel, Minho trailing right behind her. “Stop following me.” 

“What’s wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong with _you?_ ” she said, finally turning back to face him, her angry tone slowly but surely bubbling to the surface. “Pretending to be drunk? Being an asshole then kissing me? Who the hell do you think you are?”

For the first time, Minho’s expression was unreadable. He didn’t speak for what seemed like a long time, and at this point, Byeol was totally livid. “Look, I’m sorry for that,” he said almost pleadingly. “I didn’t know how else to tell you.”

“Are words not enough for you? Couldn’t you have just told me what you wanted to say? Wouldn’t it have been better for the both of us if you just told me how you really feel about me?”

“I’m new to this sort of thing,” he confessed as he pouted and as his hands didn’t know what to do. 

“So you decided to fake your intoxication and kiss me just like that? Man, I said you were a piece of work, but I didn’t realize it was to this extent.”

It took him a while to answer, and Byeol didn’t know if it was just her eyes and the evening playing tricks on her, but did he just blush? “Again, I’m sorry for what I did to you,” he said, “but I may or may not have been wanting to kiss you ever since we had that dance.”

“Excuse me?” she said, her anger dying down. “What do you mean by that?”

He groaned and locked his hands behind his neck as a sign of frustration. “God, you’re going to hate me for this.”

“As if I don’t already.”

“Remember what I said about not believing in love at first dance?”

That stopped her in her tracks and almost made her jaw fall to the floor. What was he saying now? That he liked-liked her since Day Two? This kind of thing didn’t happen to her; she even thought that this kind of thing never happened to anyone except Hyunjin, and even then, she somewhat refused to believe it. She absolutely didn’t know how to respond. 

“Looks like you don’t have the words either,” he said as he stepped closer to her. Her instincts were all over the place, telling her that she should turn back and run for the hotel, but something made her stay in her place and look up at Minho. “I guess what I’m trying to say is that I like you, Lee Byeol, and if you’ll have me, I swear to you that I’ll try my best to make you happy.”

“God, you’re gross,” was the only thing that came out of her mouth when he said that, though her tone was much more endearing than she thought it would be. 

He snorted and rubbed the back of his neck in embarrassment, his gaze landing on everything except Byeol. It was so obvious he wasn’t ready to confess about this type of thing, and everything he just said seemed to betray all his principles. Speaking of which, she remembered that was what he whispered to himself that day they danced. Maybe he was pertaining to this?

“I thought you didn’t believe in that kind of stuff,” she said slowly and carefully. “You told me that when we were drinking.” 

“I guess I was just in denial,” he said, looking down like a kicked puppy. “You can say I didn’t fully realize it until I did what I did. That’s kind of why I needed a drink after that time during the Ballroom for Oldies, and I only came up with the plan when we were drinking.” 

“This is extremely convoluted and quick.” 

“I’m a convoluted and quick person.”

“You really are, though.” 

They both laughed small ones, yet it would be the shiest one they would ever share. “I’ll be on my way, I guess.” 

“Wait,” she said as she grabbed his arm just as he was going to pass by her. It felt like a dramatic move, but she knew what she wanted to say, and she was going to say it with full confidence. “I know I was initially shocked by everything, but I just want to know: I’m not just like your other conquests, am I? None of that one-night stand, fling-y stuff?”

He nodded solemnly with a worried expression. “Did you think I was just going to treat you like that?”

“A little bit, yeah,” she admitted, her apprehensions coming to light. “It’s just… I’ve had my fair share of assholes, and I thought you would be one more to add to the list.” 

He mulled it over for a little bit, biting the inside of his cheek. “Depends; what kind of person do you want me to be?” 

“I can’t dictate that,” she said, her head disappearing into her neck. “Though I may or may not have liked it better when you were a little bit mean to me.” 

“So you’re into that kind of stuff? I can get with that.” A grin was on his face when he said that, and she couldn’t help but land a huge punch on his shoulder, prompting a hurt yet laughing noise from the man. “Geez, I was kidding.” 

“That’s what you get for making fun of me,” she grumbled. “Anyway, just be yourself and we’ll be fine.” 

“So, you’re not rejecting me?”

“We should go back to the hotel,” she said cheekily as she trudged back. 

“Lee Byeol, you’re going to be the death of me.”

She turned back and smiled at him, stretching her hand out for him to take, and he did so, albeit reluctantly. It was kind of adorable and commendable how he turned from an overall disagreeable person to some shy and lovesick idiot. It was like Grumpy turned into Bashful, and she couldn’t exactly complain. Maybe she was a little bit overjoyed that she found out what it was like to have someone who wasn’t so evasive, someone who wasn’t such a fuckboy. There were memories she would have chosen to forget, anyway.

“You’re still a nuisance, though,” Minho said to her as they reached the hotel lobby. “That’s not going to change.” 

“I try my best.” They shared knowing looks and Byeol could’ve sworn he looked at her ever so lovingly that her insides felt like they were going to melt. They let go of each other’s hands as soon as they saw Hyunjin waving to them from the elevators.

“Lovebirds, hi,” Hyunjin said as he got to where they were standing, and Byeol narrowed her eyes at him. “How are my two favorite lovers?” 

Minho cleared his throat. “You can, uh, fuck right off, Hyunjin,” he said, returning to the Minho she knew about a week ago, though she elbowed him in the ribs and he let out a wheeze. “God, why?” 

Byeol’s upper lip curled as she side-eyed Minho for a bit, though she turned her attention back to Hyunjin. “You ran off.”

“Could you blame me?” he replied as an excuse. Hyunjin was about to open his mouth, but there was a faint ringing coming from his pocket, so he held up a finger to excuse himself as he took the call. “Hello?” 

Sighing and turning to Minho, she said, “You’re not screwing with me, are you?”

“No!” Minho said incredulously. “No, why would you think that?”

“It feels a little too good to be true,” she said truthfully, looking down at her shoes and fidgeting with her fingers behind her back. 

Took him a while to come up with an answer, but she guessed it was more than she could ask for when he spoke. “Look at me,” Minho said and she did so, almost losing herself in the brown orbs he called his eyes. “I made a promise and I intend to keep it. If I don’t, you can kick me in the balls.”

“Ooh, that’ll be fun,” she said, clapping her hands once.

“I said ‘if,’” he said with a disappointed look. 

“Can I kick your balls anyway?”

“ _No._ ” He glared at her playfully but turned his attention to someone behind Hyunjin. “Hey, it’s Lix over there.” 

She peered beyond Hyunjin and saw Lix talking to the concierge, clad in an all black yet flattering outfit that showcased his lean body and muscular forearms. He looked like he was having fun talking to the administrator as his eye smile was popping out and he was grinning from ear to ear. 

“ _What?_ ” Hyunjin suddenly yelled, covering his mouth, looking like he had just witnessed somebody die in front of him. “What do you mean Felix is in Verona?”

Lix then turned in their direction and waved at them, briskly walking to them. She smiled at Lix, but something inside Byeol was turbulent, as if she was trying to swim through her thoughts but she was drowning. “Wait,” she said, realizing what Hyunjin just said. “Felix is in—“

“Hwang Hyunjin?” 

It was right then and there that Hyunjin fully turned around and almost dropped his phone to the ground. If it weren’t for Minho, the device would have exploded into a thousand different pieces. Even then, Hyunjin didn’t mind whatever happened to the phone because he was staring at the person who said his name, the person who he had been looking and pining for these past ten years, the person who was here now, and the person who probably would never leave without Hyunjin. 

Something inside Byeol just clicked when a single tear rolled down Hyunjin’s cheek, when he ran towards Felix and hugged the hell out of him. Felix buried his face in Hyunjin’s neck as they both sobbed into each other’s arms, probably crying ten years’ worth of pain and sadness. It was a beautiful sight to see, so much so that she was about to burst into tears if it weren’t for Minho’s hand holding hers, his joyful stare finally landing on hers. It would be a lie if she said she didn’t fall harder for him right where she stood, but that was a thought for another time. 

It was destiny, wasn’t it? They were destined to be together, apart, and together again. If fate would have its own way, they wouldn’t have to be separated ever again, though she guessed that there was much more space and healing to happen before everything else after. She was just glad she bore witness to Hyunjin and Felix’s undying love for each other, and she wouldn’t have it any other way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oof, looks like a lot of stuff happened in ~*this episode*~ hehe more to come soon! I'm thinking of making a spin-off because there's a lot of stuff I didn't include in this fic. Hmm. :D


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took a little longer than expected!! I added another chapter to the story, so yiz :) anyways, happy reading!!

After realizing that she and Minho should leave the couple together, she made a beeline for her room and took a shower, crying some tears of joy just as she was halfway through her bathing. It was a while before she got out and put on some sushi patterned pajama pants, but even then, she couldn’t help but smile when she thought about Hyunjin and Felix. 

A knock on the door disturbed her thoughts, and she opened it to see, lo and behold, Lee Minho himself. He was wearing a simple black shirt paired with black shorts, but instead of shoes on his feet, he wore the hotel slippers provided by the establishment. Instead of greeting her like a normal person, he looked at her from head to toe, smirked, and said, “Nice pants, loser.” 

“I wasn’t expecting visitors,” she said, pushing on his chest since he was trying to come inside. “Whoa, okay, the last time you were in my room, you were pretending to be drunk to kiss me. Are you here for another reason or are you going to try getting into my pants again?” 

He rolled his eyes and pushed past her anyway. “I don’t have anywhere to sleep considering Hyunjin might bring Felix to our room,” he explained, with a groan, as he dropped face first onto her bed. “I don’t want to see my two gay brothers having sex right in front of me with the lights out.” 

She shuddered as she closed the door. “By the way, you’re sleeping on the floor.” 

Laughing to himself, he turned himself over and stared at her smugly, posed perfectly like he was about to be painted like a French lady. “You can definitely try.” 

“Fine, then I’m sleeping on the floor.” 

“No, you’re not.”

“Excuse me?”

“Oh, you definitely want to sleep with me,” he said cockily and Byeol fake vomited. “What, am I wrong?”

She wasn’t one to tell lies, but she mustered a weak, “Yes…”

A curl of the lip and two strides later, Minho was face-to-face with her, towering over her like some gorgeous flag pole that had no business being in her space. He was close. Too close, even. She found their bodies even closer when Minho walked forward with Byeol moving backwards, finding herself in a literal tight spot when he cornered her with his arms on either side of her head. “I said, am I wrong?” 

Standing her ground, she stared straight into his eyes and managed the weakest glare anyone could ever give someone, her bottom lip quivering and her right eye twitching. “You’re wrong,” she spat out, though her voice cracked on the very last word. She cursed herself for being like this. 

Just like that, Minho managed to slip his knuckle under her chin and turn her face up to him, their faces and lips just centimeters apart. “Am I still wrong?” he breathed, the air practically tickling her face because of their proximity. 

“Get off of me, Minho.” The words just tumbled out of her mouth defensively, even if she so badly wanted _it_ to happen. 

“Damn, you can resist me?” he said, his eyes widening and a complacent smile on his face.

“I mean, if Hyunjin can do it, so can I,” Byeol joked, and he faked getting shot in the heart and dropped to the bed. 

“Fuck, man, that shit hurts,” he said, squirming on the bed.

She chuckled nervously as she folded the last of her dirty laundry and placed it in the hamper. “Hey,” she started, “is it true what Hyunjin said? That you’ve never gone out with anyone ever since six years ago?” 

“Nah,” he said, crossing his legs over the bed. “I’ve gone out with a handful of people, and I literally mean a handful. And I don’t do shit like flings. Too fleeting.”

That made her stop for a little bit, trying to process what he’d just said. “You’re not joking with me, right?” 

“What makes you think I’m fucking with you?” he asked. “Do you want me to tell you about my relationships?” 

“No, no, I’m good,” she said. 

“Wait a second.” He didn’t look at her when he came to the realization, and it was surprisingly predictive even though it took him a slightly longer time than she’d expected. “Did you have anyone that fucked you up? Is that why you’re here in Verona? Is that why you’re so suspicious of me?”

She smiled a sad one as she sat beside him and sighed. “Yes, partly yes, and yes,” she said regretfully. “I was one of those people who caught feelings for a fuckboy and decided to let myself be the fool of the situation when I chased him down and kept pushing it, to the point that I just became a crying mess on the floor and a total wreck all-in-all. Pretty harrowing experience, but I got through it. Thought I needed the vacation as a reward, and here I am.”

“I thought you were here because you wanted a break from teaching.” 

“That’s where the ‘partly yes’ comes in,” she explained, and she folded her hands on her lap, not being able to look at Minho at all. “I did come here because of heartbreak, but I came here because I wanted to get some passion back in my life. That experience was so disheartening that I couldn’t find a way to bring myself back up, to the point that it affected my work. I asked for an indefinite leave because I was becoming a problem to everyone else, so I decided to lock myself away in Verona to heal what was left of the wounds.” 

Minho nodded and rubbed his hands on his thighs. “I get it now.” 

She kept thinking of possible replies so that she didn’t come off as hateful towards herself.“So, that’s my love story for you,” she said with a self-deprecating laugh. “It’s—“

Minho decided to shut her up by placing his hands on either side of her face, tilting his head, and softly placing his plush lips on hers. The first time he kissed her, her eyes were open and she didn’t like it at all, but this was a visitor she was willing to welcome, so her lids fell closed and she leaned into him, feeling every spark in her body explode all at the same time. She felt like a teenager, feeling all shy and timid facing her crush, kissing him for the very first time. It made her feel so childish, but she felt like it was just right. Being with him felt right, and she hadn’t felt like that in the longest time. 

“Forget about them,” Minho whispered against her lips, and he brought their foreheads together, his hands never leaving her face. 

“I’m going to kill you for making me feel this way, Lee Minho,” she warned him, and he couldn’t help but smile at her as he rubbed his thumbs on her cheeks. This almost drove her crazy if it weren’t for her almost gagging at his sweetness. 

“How exactly do you feel about me, hmm?” he asked as he let go of her face and sat back on his hands, looking her up and down ever so smugly. “Do you like me back? Do I drive you crazy? Do you think I’m fuckable?” 

Her ego got stuck in her throat as her laugh came out of her nose. “There’s no way I’m answering that.” 

“Why not? I just want to know if you’re willing to fuck—“

“ _Goodnight_ , Lee Minho,” she said as she moved over to the other side of the bed, leaving him a chuckling mess where he was. She got under the covers and lied down on her pillow without even looking at him, and as she was about to get comfortable, she couldn’t. There was a strange lump under her head, and when she sat up to look at the source of discomfort, it was Minho’s arm, stretched out towards her, open for her to lie down on. “What are you doing?” 

He shrugged and said, “What does it look like I’m doing?” 

“You’re impossible,” she said as she grabbed his arm and set it on his stomach, prompting the biggest pout of all time. “Don’t give me that, Lee Minho.”

“But why?” he cried as he wriggled in the bed like a child. Maybe he _was_ a child; who knew? 

“I am _not_ cuddling with you right now.” 

It took a while for him to digest what she just said, but he simply smiled and retracted his hand when he did. “If you don’t want to cuddle, then that’s fine with me. I can just wait until you’re ready.” 

Well, that was surprisingly sweet of him. She didn’t know how to respond when he was just lying there, his eyes closed and a small smile on his lips. His expression wasn’t expectant, and he wasn’t doing the thing where he would peek at her with one eye and pretend to be asleep; instead, he was actually trying to fall asleep, knowing that she didn’t want to hug him in her sleep. 

Or did she? 

They only started today, but she felt like she’d known him for years, and she used to feel like that was an impossible feat, but ever since today happened, she felt like it was just right to assume that he’s only had good intentions for this relationship. There were so many questions in her head that simply couldn’t be answered by mere thinking, so she thought to just go with her gut and trust it. 

With a sigh, she unfolded Minho’s left arm, slid under the covers, and lied down on it, surprising him and even herself. 

“Are you sure you want to do this? I told you I could wait and—“

“Just go with it,” she said to shut him up and closed her eyes to focus on sleeping. She felt the weight on the bed shift as she felt a certain warmth get closer to her face, and when she opened her eyes, she came face-to-face with his chest, his arm on her waist and his face almost nuzzled in. “Are you sure this is comfortable?” 

“As comfy as it can be,” he mumbled, fully burying his face in her hair. The way she felt safe in his arms was just a conundrum to her. “Are you comfortable?”

She mulled it over for a little bit and found herself squeezing into the small space even more. “As comfy as I can be.” 

“Good,” he said after yawning. “Let’s go to sleep.” 

She fell asleep safely and soundly that night. She didn’t even wake up in the middle of the night like she used to with the fuckboy she used to “date”, which was a huge sigh of relief, but she was still a little bit awkward with the fact that they only started that one fateful day. Either way, she enjoyed all the things that happened with the two of them, and if she was having fun, then it wouldn’t be time wasted.

The next morning, she woke up all alone in bed. In her angry headspace, she punched Minho for leaving right before she had the chance to say goodbye, and try as she might to give him the benefit of the doubt, leaving her to her own devices after cuddling was not the way to go at all. 

She didn’t expect to be this pissed when she got out of bed, but here she was, angrily showering her feelings away. When she was done, she blow-dried her hair and put on a fresh and simple pair of light-colored jeans and a white shirt, and headed straight down for the hotel restaurant to have some breakfast. 

It was fated for her to feel turbulent on the inside when she saw the trio of Minho, Hyunjin, and Felix sitting by a square table with one seat free, probably waiting for Byeol’s ass to sit on it, but she knew she shouldn’t intrude, especially when she still felt horrible because Minho left her just like that. 

Sad as it was, Felix was the one who spotted her from across the room, raising his hand and waving with his whole arm like his life depended on it. Hyunjin and Minho’s heads turned her way, with Hyunjin beaming at her and Minho… well, she didn’t know what kind of expression his face held. For one second, it looked like his eyes were drawn to her, but the next, they bored holes into her. She felt a little bit small and a little bit irritated, but she couldn’t say no to Felix, so she strode over to the table with the smallest and shiest of smiles. 

“Good morning,” Felix said in Korean, and it was an understatement to say that she was totally shocked and confused. 

“Wait—“

“He speaks Korean?” Minho said in a bored tone. “Yeah, same here.” 

“I need a minute,” she said jokingly as she sat down, and Hyunjin and Felix just laughed at her. 

Minho shifted comfortably and smugly in his seat, and she wondered just how hot her glare was on him. It turned out to be the smallest of flames, considering he didn’t even blink her way. This just made her a little bit more pissed off. 

“We were just talking about how we used to climb the trees and eat apples back in the day,” Hyunjin said, his hand still in Felix’s grasp, his thumb running circles over and over the back of his palm. “I can still hear Jisung’s panicked ass shouting at us from the ground, knowing that our teacher was coming back soon.” 

“Please save me,” Minho whispered, rubbing his temples. She wished she could say the same, but it would just be rude. 

Hyunjin snorted and waved him off. “Don’t be such a sourpuss.” 

“Great, you sound just like her, now.” He jabbed his thumb in her direction, and she mustered a small joking scowl, even if it was half-meant. 

“Wait, Felix, what brings you to Verona? This is all crazy destiny, and I’m dying on the inside trying to figure out just what brought everyone to this city,” she said in a rush, and Felix just smiled brightly at her. 

Minho sighed and shifted again in his seat. “Read too many books, nuisance?” 

“Looks like you haven’t read enough,” she retorted, and even if he blew out a laugh of exasperation, his eyes were kind, and she instantly felt a pang of guilt, though she squashed it down completely when she remembered what he just did this morning. 

“I’m sorry, but are you guys fighting right now?” Felix said, looking utterly and completely confused, his finger jutting out and shifting between her and Minho. “We can get out of your way, if you’d like.” 

His lover rolled his eyes in faux irritation as he said, “Minho’s been this way to her ever since they met, and even if they can’t acknowledge their feelings for one another this late into the game, then I don’t know when that’ll happen. It’s just fate playing games again, that’s all.”

Minho’s upper lip curled as he mockingly uttered a single word. “Fate.” 

“ _Anyway,_ ” Byeol continued, “you were saying, Felix?” 

It was a wonder how he kept his bright grin throughout her conversation with Minho, but it was welcomed nonetheless. “I promised myself a long time ago that I would do whatever it took to get back to Hyunjin after he left that day, but it took years for me to get over my sadness and actually work for it. My family migrated to Korea a few years after the Verona classes, and I thought I could find him, but…” 

“It would take decades for you to find him in Korea,” she supplied for him, and he nodded. 

“My parents stopped caring for me a few years back, too, so I decided to save up for a trip to Verona myself and start from there,” he explained. “I went to Jisung to ask him for help, but he said he didn’t know where you guys stayed, and it’s crazy to think that I met you guys just before I saw Hyunjin for the first time in ten years.” 

“We actually sent a letter to your Australian address,” Byeol said, remembering what Hyunjin had said before. “What happened to that?”

He gave her a huge thumbs up along with the signature Felix grin. “I asked the new residents to send it over to my address back in Korea, and I still haven’t gotten access toit up to now.”

“Well, that’ll be a surprise for when you get back home, hmm?” she said. 

“Please don’t read it,” Hyunjin pleaded. “I said so many cringy things.” 

“All the more you should read it,” Minho said, and everyone in the table laughed. Even she did, although the happiness died down as quickly as it came. She still felt like poop, and she just wondered when it would stop. 

In order for her not to feel so sad about everything, she stood up and excused herself from the table ever so quickly. “I just need to get some food,” she said to not worry the lovers. 

“I’ll come with,” Minho said, standing up. “Haven’t had breakfast yet.”

Great. With Hyunjin and Felix’s goodbye wishes, she and Minho walked over to the buffet table wordlessly, getting their respective plates of food separately. She felt him stare at her a couple of times, but she dismissed them, focusing solely on the small sausages and breads she put on her plate. Before she could leave, however, Minho slightly pulled at her arm, stopping her. 

“What do you want?” she spat. 

“What’s with the sudden hostility?” he asked, taken aback. “Are you okay?” 

“No, I’m not,” she said, “and if you could please leave me alone, that would be the greatest thing in the world.”

“I’m not leaving you until we sort this out,” he said worriedly, setting his plate down on the buffet table. “What happened to you?”

She shook his hand off of her arm, though more softly than she’d hoped. “I don’t want to talk right now, Minho. Not after what happened this morning.”

He looked stunned, not knowing how to respond properly. “Is this about me leaving early?”

“What else could it be about?” she said, tears stinging her eyes. She looked around and realized there were people around, so she kept her voice down, though her emotions were still there, raw and waiting to be released. “Do you honestly think that it was such a good idea for me to wake up alone just after you took advantage of this… thing that we just started? As a person who’s had her heart broken _very badly_ before, I’m beginning to see what this is starting to look like.” 

Nonplussed. That’s how he looked like at that moment, just staring at her incredulously with his mouth moving but no sound coming out. Finally, he came up with a reply. “I went out for a bit to get clothes from my room, but Hyunjin and Felix spotted me. They dragged me to have breakfast with them, and I didn’t even get the chance to say goodbye to you—which I deeply regret, by the way—but that doesn’t mean my intention was to leave you just like that. I made a promise.”

She suddenly felt a little bit embarrassed and her pride was a little bit hurt, but the pain was still there, the trauma just fanning the flames. Still, she had to calm down and be level-headed about it. “Look, if you want to leave me, then that’s fine. I—“

“Byeol, I don’t want to leave you,” he interrupted, and he launched into an entire tangent, one that she wasn’t expecting to hear. “I’m not some fuckboy that’s going to ruin your life for the second time, nor am I one to break my promises; I’m someone who’s willing to go down the line with you no matter what it takes, no matter the circumstance. That’s who I am, Byeol, and I’m not going to change anytime soon. If you’ll still have me, then I’ll stay. If you don’t want me to stay by your side anymore, I’ll let it happen, but when I say that I don’t want to leave you, it’s the truth.”

She didn’t know what to say back. For the first time in a long while, she was speechless, and water was threatening to roll down her cheeks. She held them in, however, when she walked away from Minho and headed straight for the table, the kicked puppy trailing just behind her. He kept calling out to her, but his voice was muffled and all she could hear was the thumping of her heartbeat in her ears. The only time the banging in her chest disappeared was when she heard Felix’s voice. 

“You guys are back,” he said a little too happily. Then again, maybe that was his normal tone.

“Yeah,” she mustered weakly as she shakily set down her plate on the table with Minho doing the same, yet wordlessly. 

Hyunjin then launched into a long story about how they used to train until the next day, them having, at most, three hours of sleep before going back to their classes. Byeol could barely listen when all she could hear was pounding in her ears, and by the time Hyunjin and Felix were done reminiscing about parts of their love story, she had already finished the last of her meal. The conversations died down a little bit, and she used this to excuse herself to go back to her room, and they let her, even if Minho had some silent objections. 

The room felt a little bit too empty, and so did the bed. She lied down face up, staring at the ceiling, trying to process her feelings. It wasn’t his fault that she had problems with relationships, though she was still angry that fate had let certain circumstances happen, leading her to feel this way about him. It wasn’t his fault at all, but it was that one guy’s fault that she ended up broken. It was him and only him, not precious Minho.

By the time she stopped thinking, it was already after lunch. A sudden knock on the door brought her out of her thoughts, and she stood up slowly to open it, only to find that Hyunjin was on the other side. “Hyunjin, hi,” she said, a little bit surprised. “What are you doing here?” 

“I don’t suppose we could have a little chat?” he asked carefully, his hands fidgeting with each other. “Minho told me everything, and I was hoping I could talk to you a little bit about it.” 

She mulled it over for a bit, her gaze going everywhere except on him, but she ultimately decided to fully open the door and let him in, in more ways than one. They sat beside each other on the bed silently, but it was sort of comfortable. 

He sighed and took her hand, but not without asking permission. “I’m more than happy that you guys started this entire thing,” he started, “but I think some topics are up for discussion.” 

“I know it wasn’t his fault that things happened the way they did, but I couldn’t help but feel like… feel like shit about this entire thing,” she explained, starting to come to terms with what she felt.

“It’s alright, I know that,” he said. “He told me that apparently, you don’t curse much, so I’m guessing if it made you do that, it’s something really close to your heart. However, there’s a little something that makes relationships work, though, and it’s called trust.” 

She was silent for a little bit, knowing that he was right. It really was the core of the problem, and she knew she was the only one that could fix it. No matter the situation, she knew she needed to trust in Minho if she wanted everything to work out in the future.

“I don’t know about you, but trust is something like gambling,” he said, rubbing his thumbs over the surface of her hand. “You really don’t know what you’re going to get when you trust in something or in someone, and if you bet big, you either win or lose big. It’s a high stakes kind of thing, but there’s some kind of treasure within.”

Nodding, she said, “I get what you mean.” 

“I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but Minho’s one in a million; he has the most genuine of intentions and is a master of executing what needs to be done. Trust in him and you’ll reap the best treasures of all. All you need to do now is ask yourself if you’re ready to trust in someone again, and actually do it.” 

Once again, she was thrown into silence and into her thoughts. She knew she was ready; it was just that she reacted poorly to her trauma. It didn’t mean that she shouldn’t fully acknowledge it, though, because it really was there and held a dark place in her heart, and even she knew she had to work hard to shake it off. There was space for change, and there was space for growth. 

After stirring things around in her thoughts, she simply smiled at Hyunjin. “I hope you know that this really helped a lot,” she said. “I think I know what I have to do and say.” 

“No problem,” he said, patting her hand and releasing it from his grasp. “I’ll try to call up Minho from his sulky, broody self and let him talk to you. Besides, we’re all leaving in a few days or so; I guess it’s time for you guys to make up before then.” 

“Let him take his time, I guess,” she said, “because maybe I need to take mine.”

Hyunjin nodded and she led him out of the room with a happy smile. Once the door closed behind her, she felt a single tear roll down her cheek, but she swiped it away quickly because it wasn’t worth her time to cry about some lame ass dude she chose to forget. Minho was here now, and he promised he wasn’t going to leave her anytime soon, and that was simply enough.

Before she trudged up to Hyunjin and Minho’s room, she knew she had to take a breather first. She dressed in comfortable clothes and went down to the restaurant to have an early dinner and, finding herself alone, decided to have a drink of rosé wine. Or two… or five. She needed the goddamn confidence to strike up _that_ conversation with Minho. 

Finally tipsy enough and a few bad decisions later, she ended up in front of room four-one-nine and, of course, drunkenly knocked on the door. A few moments later, the door swung open and out came Minho, dressed in a light brown shirt and dark blue jeans, a similarly colored cap on his head, looking like he was about to leave. “Byeol,” he said, surprised. “What are you—wait, why are you red? Did you drink?”

“Maybe, maybe not,” she slurred in true Minho fashion. 

“Oh, god, you little shit,” he said endearingly, bringing her in by the arm and setting her down on the bed. “What am I going to do with you?” 

“No, no, okay, listen,” she said, trying to reason with him as he sat down on the bed, her hands flailing everywhere. “I’m sorry for reacting the way that I did this morning.” 

“No, don’t be sorry,” he said to console her. “Things just happened the way they did, and it was normal for you to act like that. Don’t be sorry at all.” 

She smiled and laughed a little bit, her eyes half-lidded. “Okay, thanks, you get me.” She found herself laughing again, but this time, with Minho. “Look, Hyunjin talked to me about some things and I think you deserve to get some explanations for what’s been happening in my life at the moment.” 

Minho nodded as he slipped his hand ever so slyly on hers, softly placing them in his own hands. “Go on.” 

She blurted out words she didn’t expect to, but there they were, out in the open, free for him to hear. This was her original plan, anyway. “All my life, I always thought love stories should just stay in books, but ever since I met you, I’ve been proven completely wrong,” she started. “You see, I’ve been having trouble starting relationships again because I always think that I’m never going to get out of the rut I put myself in, but I realize that’s never the way to go.” 

“It really isn’t the way to—“

“Shh,” she interrupted, placing a finger on his lips, smiling like a drunk weirdo. Maybe she _was_ the drunk weirdo. “Again, ever since I met you, I think I’ve started to take my own advice more seriously and take them to heart. Look, I may not be the perfect person—I don’t curse my feelings and everything around me as much as you do, I don’t have enough confidence in myself, I don’t like Greek yogurt—but what I do know is that with you, I’m going to be happy. With you, I’m willing to gamble whatever it takes to make this relationship work. With you, I’m going to start believing in love again.” 

With all of the words finally out in the open, Minho breathed the most incredulous of laughs and just simply laid her head down on his shoulder, something that she would be forever grateful for because she was about to hurl at any given second. They stayed like that for a while until Minho spoke two words that summed up what he wanted to say.

“Thank you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I decided to write this chapter mainly bc i've had a similar experience, in the sense that past events rly screwed me over and I developed trauma over it, and mainly bc I want to give ppl some hope, I guess??? It gets better and u get better, too!! I know this sounds a little like me being overly optimistic, but it rly does get better :) spread some positivity in these trying times, y'all!! If u have any problems or reactions or comments abt the chapter, I'd love to talk abt it with u guys!! See u in the next chapter or so <3


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the late update! I was working on another story hehe thinking of posting another story that's based off of something again and compile it : ) I'm planning to post another Minho story and end the trio there, then I'll probably do a new series with Hyunjin in it ehe we shall see!!
> 
> Also I'm using other idols' names in this chapter bc I'm multifandom like that, but don't associate their characters with their actual personalities!! I just used their names and that's pretty much it ehe

She could barely remember what happened after he’d tucked her in his bed, although that was after Hyunjin had entered the room and got some of his clothes before ultimately saying that he would stay at Felix’s for the night. Some memories were retained, though, like Minho whispering to her just before he fell asleep, and her looking at his serene, sleeping face before she fell totally asleep, too. 

Waking up the next morning without Minho in the bed yet again, her head started to pound and the room seemed to be spinning round and round in circles. She knew this familiar feeling and was about to crawl out of bed to get the glass of water beside the bed when a certain someone—another tall glass of water—got out from his hot shower, towel wrapped around his waist, shaking his head like a wet dog, his torso free for everyone to see. 

She took a huge gulp as she struggled to find the words to say, and her headache may or may not have gone away for a few seconds or so. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing, and she couldn’t believe that she was able to witness this without combusting right where she lay. There was a whole different dimension that she was sent into when he ran his hands through his wet hair, the towel slipping down and almost exposing the, um, nether regions to her. She was about to die from how red her face was, and she knew she had to turn around to avoid Minho’s teasing, but it was too late. 

“Good morning, starshine,” he greeted, setting his hands down on either side of her body and planting the shortest of kisses on her cheek. The closeness of his body to hers and the way he casually just kissed her may or may not have stirred her insides a little bit, but she knew that she would be held at gunpoint for her to admit that it had that kind of effect on her. “Looks like someone has a hangover.” 

“I do not,” she dragged out, making it known that she did, indeed, have a hangover. His face was inches away from hers, and, finding out that the expression on his face was one of genuine happiness and cuteness, she placed a hand on his lips and started pushing him away very lightly. “I need a pain reliever; not you making out with me.” 

His face lit up, very brightly that the sun would be absolutely jealous of him. “Who said I wanted to make out with you?” he said teasingly. “Anyway, I expected I would have hangovers during this trip, so be thankful that I do have pain relievers.” 

“Quite unlikely for a person with a high tolerance for alcohol to be carrying hangover medicine,” she said, falling back into bed with one hand on her forehead. Her headache was killing her very, very slowly. 

“You wouldn’t have known it if Hyunjin didn’t tell you.” He went to his suitcase and unzipped the compartment in it and brought out a first-aid kit, one that had tablets in little plastic containers. He got one container out and returned the kit to his bag, standing up and handing two tablets and giving the glass of water to her. “Drink up.”

Taking the medicine and forcing them down with whatever strength she had left, she returned the glass to Minho and, with a groan, lied back down on the bed. “I hate you,” she whispered into thin air, but the remark dissipated as quickly as it came. 

“If this is your way of saying you like me, then I hate you, too,” he said back, smiling as he retreated to the closet on the left. “Do you plan on staying in bed all day or do you want to walk around to clear your head?” 

“I’ll try to get some strength back as soon as possible,” she mumbled. “For now, I just really want to rest.” 

“I can read you a bedtime story if you want.” 

It took a lot of effort to roll her eyes and let out a huge sigh, though it took little to no strength for him to chuckle at her. “Just get dressed,” she said, almost blushing. 

“I can tell you like me better like this,” he teased as he started with putting on shorts below his towel, and then putting on a shirt over it. “You don’t need to say it, but I know you do like me this way.” 

She faked her gagging and tossed and turned away from Minho in bed, trying to keep her feelings in check. She closed her eyes as she felt the weight on the bed shift, Minho sliding into the covers just as quick as a fuckboy would slide into a girl’s DMs. With a small sound coming out of his mouth, she opened her eyes to see him propping his head up on one fist as he smoothly moved his arm to settle on her waist, all the while a small smile forming on his lips. 

“What are you looking at, punk?” she asked ever so threateningly. Well, not really, with the way she slurred her words and her eyes half-lidded. 

“You.” 

“Okay.” She was about to turn the other way when Minho complained by letting out a pleading noise from his mouth, so she chose to stay that way just in his field of view, a little bit embarrassingly, a little bit lovingly. “What happened last night?” 

He shrugged, pouting. “You fell asleep, I fell asleep; we both fell asleep.” 

Telling the truth, he was, but it seemed like he was holding something back. “Is that everything?” she asked.

“Well, that, and you threw up on yourself so I called Hyunjin to change your clothes because I didn’t want to see you naked,” he said in a rush, and Byeol looked down to see that she was indeed, wearing a pair of Minho’s own clothes. The white shirt with “World of Dance” printed on it seemed to be a little bit too big on her, but it was enough to call it oversized. Gray shorts were around her hips and it was a miracle they didn’t slide down in her sleep. “Yep, those are my clothes, alright.” 

She groaned and threw herself under the covers, clearly embarrassed that she had to go through that sort of thing when all she wanted to do was give Minho a piece of her mind. She shouldn’t have drank five glasses of wine last night, but she knew that was the only way she could gather up the confidence to say what she wanted to say, even if she’d said the words drunkenly. Drunk words were truth, anyway.

“Don’t sweat it,” he said consolingly. “Just rest as much as you can; I’ll just be here.” 

Coming out from under the blanket, she stared at him with her puppy dog eyes, not knowing what she wanted from him, even if he wasn’t looking in her direction and had his eyes closed, his head still placed on his fist. Sighing to herself, she slithered up to the space under him, not knowing what came over her. She buried her face in the crook of his neck and placed her folded hands under her head, still closing her eyes but welcoming the heat of his body against hers. 

Minho’s arm automatically wrapped itself around her waist, making her feel all sorts of things. “You’re a nuisance,” he said, kissing the top of her head. This almost drove her to the point of no return if it weren’t for Minho rattling on. “If having a hangover does this to you, then I may as well just take you to the distillery and go to town.”

With all her remaining strength, she punched him hard on the shoulder, and simply laughed at his pained response. She made herself even more comfortable and almost fell asleep right then and there. 

“To tell you the truth—and I mean this in the most honest way possible—it’s a wonder that I get to see your face when I go to sleep in the evening, and still see the same face when I wake up in the morning.” 

“What are you saying?” she said after yawning, taken aback, but slowly and surely falling asleep where she lay. 

“Maybe I could get used to this,” he said. “Just maybe.” 

She cuddled closer to him and fell asleep with a small smile on her face. 

Waking up after an hour or so, and still in Minho’s arms this time, she stared at his angelicyet demonic face, wondering just how much it would take for her to fall completely in love with him. It was a fast-paced relationship and she couldn’t help but think about what would happen in the future—if it still _had_ a future, that is. 

Was she ready to start again?

It looked like she would have to save that question for another time because Minho stirred in his sleep and eventually opened his eyes, stretching and smiling so contentedly at her. “You made me fall asleep again,” he accused, and Byeol just snorted at him. “I was just waiting for you this entire time and I fell asleep again.” 

“You didn’t have to sleep,” she said back. 

“Eh, what else could I do while hugging you in your sleep?” he said with an eye smile. “How are you feeling?” 

She also stretched like a cat, yawning and rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. “Better. Everything isn’t spinning anymore, and my head doesn’t feel as bad as a while ago.” 

“That’s good to hear,” he said, laying his head back down on the bed. Suddenly, his face lit up like an idea had come to mind, and he spoke his mind and confirmed that indeed, an idea had come to his mind. “Hey, would you like to go on a date with me later?” 

“What?” 

“I dunno,” he said with an eye smile. “I just wanted to ask you out on a date on a whim, and I don’t know what else to do in Verona with you other than go strolling around the city. It’ll be good, I swear.” 

“I mean, I trust you in the sense that it’d be good to walk around and see the city,” she said. “What do you want to—wait, I have an idea.” 

He cocked his head to the right. “Do tell.” 

“Show me your skills,” she said excitedly. “You’re a distiller, right? You know a thing or two about wines and spirits and stuff like that; I want to take you to places that have alcoholic drinks so that you can show me just how you judge stuff.” 

A breath came out of his mouth, a little bit incredulous at her idea. “I’m not as interesting as you think, you know.” 

Shrugging, she simply said, “I mean, anything I don’t know about is pretty interesting to me.” 

“Smart and inquisitive, I’ll give you that.”

“Jeongin says the same thing, too,” she recalled. “He keeps telling me I’m smart but really stupid at the same time, considering, uh, certain life choices.” 

He nodded and pouted at the same time, but his confused expression suddenly came out. “Wait, who’s Jeongin?” 

She thought of an answer before saying it out loud, knowing that this was her time to shine. “Oh, you know, just my side boy.” 

“I can get with that.” 

“What.” 

He laughed at her equally bewildered expression and got out of bed, swinging his legs over and standing up, stretching to the high heavens. “You can’t play me, Lee Byeol,” he said ever so casually as she also exited the pillow palace. 

“Fine,” she said in defeat. “Jeongin’s my best friend. He’s a kindergarten teacher back at home.” 

“That’s cool,” he said. “How long have you guys been friends for?” 

“Ever since the start of university, so that’s around ten years now? It’s been so long I can barely remember how we met.” She found herself leaning against the bedpost and staring at him sort through his things. It was a little messy around here, but it was comfy.

“How did you meet him?”

She hummed, trying to remember how exactly they met. It was all really hazy considering it was ten years ago and it wasn’t too memorable. “We met during our freshman orientation because he was sitting beside me, scared to death like a little child alone in a supermarket,” she said, recalling all the stupid memories they had in school. “I helped him answer the questions on his form, and it turned out that we were in the same course, and that a few days later, he would introduce me to the strongest _soju_ I’ve ever tasted.” 

“Interesting,” he dragged out as he went to the closet on the left. “So you’re saying this guy lives a double life as a scaredy cat but also as a bad influence.” 

“Oh, definitely,” she said, smiling at the memory of her best friend. “It was the first time in my life that I’d tasted something that strong, and I’ll never forget it. Also, he drank at least once every week during our freshman year and our senior year; I’d know because I would come with him.” 

Minho snorted as he brought out an ensemble of clothes, one that would look surprisingly good on him. “Guess life was easier when you were a student, wasn’t it?” he said as he took a look at his simple, black, printed, oversized shirt and denim shorts. It was the total boyfriend look and she was going to swoon if this was what he was going to wear to their date. “Also, I thought you had a low tolerance for alcohol.” 

“I do,” she said truthfully. “However, I do like drinking. It helps soothe my nerves and in checking the papers.” 

“Is it because people have stupid answers to tests?”

“You bet.” 

He smiled and blew out a laugh without looking at her. Once he did, however, her heart almost stopped at how handsome he was just standing there, not doing anything, and she couldn’t believe how fast she was falling for a guy like him. It was so not Byeol-like to do something like this, but here she was. 

Before she was dragged into the spell of his eyes, she sighed and moved to exit the room, just wanting to take a shower and get ready for their date. However, that wasn’t the case when Minho blocked the door with her back to it, his arms on either side of her face. 

“I’m not letting you go dress up unless you kiss me goodbye,” he said threateningly, albeit sexually. 

“You do know that it would take a million years for me to kiss you myself, right?” she said in the most honest way possible. She wasn’t going to let her guard down easily, and she wasn’t going to lower her pride for the same reason. “I’m not going down so quickly, Lee Minho.”

Instead of having a witty comeback, he simply moved in closer and set his soft lips on top of hers, completely catching her off guard, to the point that she slightly kissed him back. It was a stupid idea for him to do that, but what could she do when he was being so upfront and candid with her? 

Not thinking properly, she poked him in the ribs with two fingers and he pulled away with the most pained of laughs. “You’re impossible,” she said as she reached for the doorknob and pulled on it, trying to escape from Minho’s clutches, and he let her, but not without moving in for another kiss and ultimately failing at his advance. 

Her cheeks were blazing even until the end of her shower, even until she finally settled ona yellow floral dress, a similarly colored cardigan, and nude, low-heeled, strap-on shoes. This was after twenty-five minutes of trying to figure out what to wear, which she hasn’t done in a _very_ long while, considering that she hasn’t felt this giddy about a budding relationship in the longest time. 

There was a knocking at the door and she quickly answered it, revealing Minho in his monochromatic boyfriend outfit, a black sling bag on his shoulder. 

“Look, lady, I know you’re a woman and you take longer to get ready than the rest of us, but—oh, _okay_ ,” he rambled on but he stopped when he looked her up and down, a smirk forming on his face. “You didn’t have to get ready for me, but I appreciate the very huge effort.” 

“You were saying?” she said, crossing her arms and pulling her eyebrow up. 

“Nothing. Nothing of importance at all,” he said to cover up his blunder. 

She sighed and grabbed her satchel from the bed and closed the door behind her but not without checking if the keycard was with her. After she made sure that all of her things were with her, she grabbed Minho’s outstretched hand and they were on their way to the first stop: a little lunch in the plaza. 

They found a small restaurant that served authentic Italian pizza and other homemade dishes, and they immediately went to dine at that one. Once their Margherita and Minho’s white wine arrived, they dug in, especially Byeol that still had a hangover and was in need of something greasy. Other than Minho, of course. 

“Wine and pizza. Really?” she asked as she took another bite out of the most delicious pizza she’d ever tasted, though she kept that information to herself. 

“What? They taste good together, and you wanted me to show you my skills, so I’ll show you,” he said, casually swirling his wine glass by the stem and not having any of the slices. 

She nodded, one side of her lips curling down. “I suppose I did ask you that,” she said with a smile. “You aren’t eating?” 

“I’ll cleanse my palate right after tasting this,” he said unleashed the dam of information. “You see, tasting wine is just like listening to music; there are different notes and strong beats to it, and everyone has subjective tastes. What’s important is that you find the wine that you like and go forward from there.” 

She nodded again, listening intently. 

“The setup of tasting wine is just as important as tasting it; white wine glasses tend to have less circumference than red wine glasses because the latter needs a bigger bowl to let the aroma out, considering red wine is bigger and bolder than white wine,” he explained. “White wine, on the other hand, is a refreshing drink. Here, have a taste.” 

He gave her the glass and she sipped from it, finding it a little bit dry, but having the overwhelming taste of a certain fruit. “Tastes like soda,” she deduced. “Tastes a _lot_ like limes.” 

Minho simply smiled at her and said, “Good job. White wines are usually flavored with lemons or limes and some other sour fruits, so it’s good that you picked that up.” 

“I’m somewhat of an alcoholic myself,” she joked, and remembered just what happened yesterday. “Okay, forget I said that, because memories just flooded my brain.” 

“This is coming from the person who got drunk on a few glasses of rosé wine,” he remarked with a cock of the eyebrow and a swig of his drink.

“You’re a dick.” 

“Did you finally just curse at me?” he said, clearly surprised, but on the hand, amused. 

“Still a dick,” she said with a cock of her own eyebrow and a bite of pizza. 

He smiled at her as he continued to swirl his glass. “The next thing you have to look at is the color of the wine,” he said as he shifted the position of his glass towards the natural light filtering in through the windows. “What do you think?” 

She was kind of happy that this lesson was interactive, though she was a little bit scared that she might get something wrong, considering there was an expert in the house. “It has a slight green tint, I think,” she guessed. 

“Yup,” he said. “White wines that have a greenish color to them are usually more savory. They’re usually flavored with limes or peppers or something like that.”

“What about the darker white wines?” 

“Those are usually fruitier,” he explained. “Mostly peach, mostly oranges.” 

“I see,” she said, finishing her second slice. “Is that it?” 

A small, high-pitched sound came out of Minho’s mouth as he was deciding whether or not he was done. “More or less,” he said. “All there was left was to smell it, but that’s a little more difficult to explain and to do.” 

“Oh?” 

“To shorten it, it just smells like how it tastes,” he said. “It’s really up to how your taste and olfactory receptors work with each other to actually form your theory.” 

“That sounds so science-y,” she said. “Surprising coming from you, really.” 

He groaned and sat back in his seat, finally taking a bite out of pizza. “I’m not smart enough to get the highest grades in university, but I do know a thing or two about being an alcohol enthusiast, which did not help throughout my stay.” 

“So you’re saying you became an alcoholic for a short period of time?” 

“I mean, if you were in love with your best friend for the longest time and he rejected but not really rejected you because he was in love with his long lost love for ten or so years, and if you’ve had only failed relationships right after you gave up on him, you’d resort to alcohol as much as I did.” 

She was shocked into silence when she’d heard that. So, he’s had failed relationships ever since he gave up on Hyunjin. That only meant a few things. “Are you saying that I’m one of the decent ones?” she said after a while. 

“Oh, definitely,” he said as he finished the rest of his white wine in one go, which she noticed was something he did when something bothered him. “In my last relationship, I already noticed a red flag on the first date but I still chose to put up with that shit for five more months.”

“What a masochistic thing to do,” she said, clearly worried. 

“What can I say? It takes an asshole to know an asshole.” He pursed his lips and let go, a bubble sound coming out of his mouth. “Would you like to hear about my last relationship?” 

“Do go on,” she said. “I’ll tell you about mine next.” 

He shrugged and said, “Well, you don’t have to, but I appreciate it.” Sighing, he proceeded to the next tangent. “It was with this girl; her name was Nayeon. Cute, shorter than me, had bunny teeth. Popular with the men and the women, but what the red flag was that she was dating three other guys at the same time she was dating me.” 

“ _Oof,_ ” she said, wincing. “That really is a red flag.” 

He rolled his eyes and flicked the white wine glass without knocking it over. “Tell me about it,” he said. “So I put up with that for a few weeks until she said she was ready to date just me and only me, so I let her get on with it. Two months later, she wanted to move in with me.” 

“ _Two months?_ ” she said incredulously. “Was she for real?”

“Apparently so.” 

“Did you let her?” 

“Of course not!” he practically yelled, probably embarrassed at the thought of that kind of thing happening. “When I refused to let her move in with me, she suggested the fucking idea of having an open relationship, and even though it took a lot of trust to give the go signal for that type of shit, I just went with it.” 

Groaning and placing her head in her hands, she said, “God, Lee Minho.”

“Turns out she was dating another dude from when we had our first date,” he said and laughed self-deprecatingly. “That’s why she wanted an open relationship. When I found out, I called it off and she fucking slapped me.” 

She threw her hands up in the air and had an exaggerated but disgusted expression. “She has the right to get mad at you even if she was dating the guy for how many months? I’m so… I’m so confused and angry.” 

“You should be,” he said with a small laugh. “Let the anger flow through you, as it did for me.”

“But also, what were you thinking?” she accused. “Have you no idea of the rut you just put yourself in?” 

“Is this coming from the person in a failed relationship with a fuckboy?” he asked with a small smile, though a little bit apologetic.

“Byun Baekhyun.” 

“Is that his name?” he said and she nodded, her lips curling up. “Hmm, does sound like a fuckboy name.” 

She sighed deeply and took another pizza bite before continuing. “I dated that guy for almost a year and we never made it official, all because I wouldn’t have sex with him.” 

“That fucking sucks, man,” he said, also wincing. “Pressuring someone to have sex with them is the worst and most disgusting fucking thing. I’ve had my fair share of those kinds of shits, too.” 

“It really does suck,” she agreed. “There was one night that I didn’t want to have sex with him because I was too tired, so he went to his ex’s house and had sex with her instead.” 

“What in the ever-living fuck?” he asked.

She rolled her eyes and crossed her arms, clearly pissed off by the memory. “To go back to the beginning, though, I helped him get over said ex. To fast forward, he tried going for Jeongin when he was drunk, and he wasn’t even bi or anything like that. Everything in between was just him forcing me to take an STD test, ghosting me every month or so, asking if I was finally ready to have sex, and basically being emotionally unavailable.” 

Minho’s palm made contact with his forehead. “That’s horrible. How did you put up with that for almost a year? How did you still like him after all that time?” 

“Guess I was just yearning for some love where I couldn’t find it,” she explained to him. “It was a pretty harrowing and disheartening experience, but I learned to get over it and become a better person because of it. Now, I’m not so broken. I learned how to pick up the pieces and start over.” 

Nodding solemnly, he went without an answer for a few moments. “I guess that’s something we can agree on.”

They finished the pizza and they argued over who would pay for the meal, and they ultimately split the bill. They walked hand-in-hand around the plaza, not knowing what to do next. Instead, they ended up strolling mindlessly. 

“So, tell me,” she started, swinging their arms around exaggeratedly. “what’s your favorite spirit?” 

He snorted as if he remembered a certain memory. “If I hate myself, I’d choose vodka; if I’m feeling a little bit okay, I’d choose whiskey; if I _really_ hate myself, I’d do thirteen shots of tequila in one night.” 

“Jesus _Christ_ ,” she said, her grip on his hand getting a little bit tighter. “You can do _thirteen_ shots of tequila? I can barely do three.” 

“It’s horrible; don’t try it. Blech,” he said, a look of disgust painted on his face. “It was a dare back in university, and I’ll forever remember it because that was the only time I passed out, and in a bar, no less.”

“You passed out in a bar?” she said, giggling. “I’ve never done that, but it sounds like a really bad experience.” 

“Hyunjin had to haul my body out of the place and I’ve never gone back to that bar ever since.” 

She sighed and started turning her steps into small kicks. “Looks like we have something to look forward to when we get back. I’m taking you there as soon as I get the chance to.”

“ _No,_ ” he warned. 

“ _Yes,_ ” she said a little too happily. “We’re going to visit all the places that we’ve had good and bad memories in, and we’re going to celebrate the past, living in the present, and moving forward into the future.”

“It’s not surprising that you’re this positive about me falling asleep in a bar.” 

“It’s not like I haven’t seen you do it the first time we’ve drank.” 

He shuddered at the thought, but quickly dismissed it as he asked, “What about you? What’s your favorite alcoholic drink?” 

She shrugged with a pout and said, “I’m a very boring person. I just like soju and rosé wine, and that’s pretty much it; I don’t like anything that tastes like cleaning agents and smelly socks. I’m willing to try everything else, though, because who knows? I might start liking cleaning agents in the future.” 

“That, again, is unsurprisingly optimistic of you,” he remarked. “What is it about you and staying so happy about everything?” 

She shrugged again and thought about the answer before spitting it out. “It’s probably because I don’t want anyone to go through the same things I did, especially the bad parts of my life,” she started. “If I stay positive, then the world around me changes for the better, no matter who or what comes my way. If someone tries to bring me down, I’m pretty sure they can’t because I’m firm with my principles and I stand strong for who and what I believe in, and I don’t think I’m going to change anytime soon.”

Minho blew out a breath, the ghost of a laugh. “I wish I could be like that, but so much shit happened in my life that I find it hard to be positive,” he confessed. “But I have to admit, though, that your positivity is rubbing off on me.” 

“Good. That’s good.”

A little while later, Minho spat out a question that she wasn’t prepared to hear. “What about this relationship, though? What do you think about it?” She stopped in her tracks, prompting a response from him. “What’s wrong?” 

“No, nothing’s wrong,” she said, feeling some whiplash from what he just asked, because it was something that she’d been asking herself ever since the start, even since this morning. “I was just caught a bit off-guard with your question.” 

“You don’t have to answer it if you don’t want to, Byeol,” he said, pacifying her. 

“No, no, I have an answer,” she said with a smile. “I absolutely hate having to embarrassingly reiterate it, but I told you last night that I’m ready to believe in love again. I’m bravely positive about this because, well, you’ve told me a lot of things that give me hope, and I think that’s enough for me. There isn’t a right answer to falling for someone because you don’t know if they’ll be there to catch you, so the important thing is to watch yourself and evaluate how you feel, and believe everything will be alright, I guess.” 

For the first time, he intertwined his fingers with hers, sending her into a frenzy of emotions. “I believe in the same thing now,” he acknowledged. “I believe in a lot of things, but the most difficult pill I’ve had to swallow is me believing in someone again. Maybe it’s all the bad relationships I’ve been in, but as you said, I don’t want that shit to happen to anyone, so I guess it’s time to start anew.”

“Glad to know we can agree on something.” 

“Probably just for now, loser.” 

“There’s the Minho I know,” she said with a small laugh and a nudge of the shoulder. “It’s going to be a good start; I know it.” 

“I’ll be here for the rest of the ride.”

“So will I.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, like, I have an epilogue that's like,,,,, 11k words,,,,, thinking if I should post it in one go or cut it into two : ) we shall see (again)!!


	7. Epilogue I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SORRY THIS TOOK SO LONG OMG quarantine has got me lazy :( anyway, here's the first part of the epilogue! tell me what you think! I'll be posting the second part of the epilogue soon jdksjkds depends on how well this fic does HUHUHU

It was about two months ever since the end of the Verona trip, and Byeol couldn’t be any giddier with how things turned out between her and Minho. Turns out he lived only thirty minutes away, and it was extremely convenient because of public transportation. 

On another note, it was terribly adorable how he seemed to go soft for her but be a dick to everyone else, which was such a Minho thing to do and she couldn’t do anything about it either. Annoying and sexually threatening as he was, she still found a way to refuse him whenever he made advances towards her, even though she so badly wanted _things_ to happen. She knew it would be more fun to tease him and ignore him. This would only lead him to want more of her attention, and it was like keeping a little puppy on a leash, only this one was all bite and all bark.

The cycle continued on and on and on, and it didn’t stop when he simply told her that night that someone would be holding a competition in Byeol’s school grounds and that his dance troupe would be the guest performer.

“ _Excuse me?_ ” she yelled into the phone, getting up from her bed.

“Yup,” he said, and she could practically cut the excitement in the air with a knife. “Looks like we’ll be seeing each other in a day or so.” 

She blew out a breath in incredulousness. “Who said I’ll be in school at that time?” 

“I do,” he said simply. “You’re gonna be there, meet me, Hyunjin, and Felix after the show, and we could go back to your place and have s—“

“ _Okay._ ” 

“—ome food. God, what did you think was I going to say?” 

She rolled her eyes as she heard chuckling on the other side. “Wait, you said Felix?”

“Yup,” he said again. “Apparently, Felix is a really good dancer, so he auditioned for the dance troupe and he got in. You can really tell how much Hyunjin pounded him that night.” 

“ _God,_ Minho,” she said in disgust as she covered her eyes and fell back on the bed. 

He laughed naughtily. He cleared his throat and said, “Hey, remember when I said—“

There was a sudden ring of the doorbell, cutting him off. She got up from her bed and exited her room, walking to answer the door. “Sorry, what were you saying? I have to go get the door.” 

“It’s alright, go get it. I’ll be here.”

She unlocked the door and opened it, revealing a man in a red plaid shirt, cropped black jeans, and black and white high-cut sneakers, a huge duffel bag on his shoulder, a pair of round glasses perched on his nose, and a phone pressed to his ear. Of course, it could only mean one thing. “ _Lee Minho?_ ” she said in both happiness and shock, putting her phone in her pocket. “What are you doing here?”

“Well, I couldn’t wait until tomorrow to see you, so here I am,” he said in the simplest way possible, as if it explained the entire situation. Well, maybe it did, but it didn’t cover the surprise she felt at that moment. 

“But… how? How did you get here so fast? How—“

“What matters is that I’m here now, and we’re going to sleep in the same bed, and cuddle each other until the sun comes up,” he said simply, pushing past her and leaving his shoes by the door. “Your apartment always smells so good.” 

Her upper lip curled as she said, “That’s because I don’t sleep on my bed with sweaty clothes on, and because I have scent sticks all over.”

“You wound me so,” he said as he placed his duffel bag on the marble counter. 

“You’re making yourself at home, I see,” she observed as she sat up on the said marble counter that Minho put his bag on. “You’re over here so much that I’m starting to feel like you live here.” 

He turned to her and smiled, striding over to her and giving her a quick peck on the lips. He placed his hands on her bare thighs—she was wearing shorts—and started rubbing them with his thumbs, which almost drove her crazy if it weren’t for his babbling mouth. “Do you want me to move over here? A little quick, if I may say so myself, but—“

“Do I look like Nayeon to you?” 

“Just giving you the option, y’know,” he said with a cheeky smile. 

She put her arms around his neck and just stared at his face, a little bit lovesick, a little bit in awe. It was almost surreal that she had this kind of fast-paced relationship with a recovered asshole like him, and that she was able to somewhat tame the bad boy and let the true Minho escape from his cage. Maybe being disagreeable was part of Minho’s real personality, but maybe it was just a foil, maybe an afterthought, that contributed to his character. Either way, she was just glad to spend as much time as she could with him.

“You’re scaring me a little bit, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I don’t like it,” he said with yet another smug smile on his face. “What are you thinking about, hmm?”

She shrugged. “Probably just how I’m going to steal the covers from you again.” 

“Oh, god,” he said exasperatedly as he hung his head on her shoulder, fully leaning into her. “Please don’t steal the blankets; I’d basically be a dead body with how cold you turn the air conditioning on.”

“Just steal them back,” she said, channeling her inner snarky Minho. 

He brought his head back up to look at her, his face centimeters away from hers. “What makes you think I can do that with your ungodly strength?” he whispered, tickling her ear. “I know one way we can put that to test.” 

“Oh, do you?” 

“Is that a threat?”

“Are you threatened?” 

“ _Ooh,_ ” he suddenly yelled, detaching himself from her, with her a laughing mess on the counter. “You’re just like me! I knew I picked the right woman.”

She rolled her eyes and pushed herself off of the counter, heading straight for her room. “Okay, it’s time for you to take a shower and sleep. You still have a performance tomorrow.” 

“You can come and join me; you don’t have to ask.” 

“Shut your pie hole, Minho,” she yelled again from her bed as she lied down. She was about to close her eyes until she heard a ding come from her phone. 

“ _So, when am I finally going to meet this guy you’ve been talking about?_ ” Jeongin asked through text. 

“ _Sooner than you think,_ ” she replied, knowing that she’ll be dragging Jeongin’s butt to the dance competition tomorrow since she didn’t really have anyone to go with. “ _If you want to meet him, you’re gonna have to come with me to the dance competition tomorrow._ ” 

“ _You mean_ Sonagi _? The one org kids have been talking about for half a year now?_ ”

“ _Yup, that one. His troupe’s the guest performer._ ” 

“ _Oh my god, hot boys dancing? This is like your wet dream._ ”

“ _SHUT UP._ ” 

She almost threw her phone against the wall, and if it weren’t for Minho coming out of the shower with a towel wrapped around his waist, his hair dripping wet and his torso in full view, she would’ve kept it in her hand. With that being said, she lost her grip on her phone and almost dropped it on the floor by accident as she struggled to keep it from crashing into a million pieces. Too many things were happening and she was trying to claw her way back up. 

It wasn’t like she hadn’t seen him half-naked before. Ever since then, her life had changed. Maybe for the better. Or not. 

Confirming her suspicions, he said, “Like what you see?” 

In true Minho fashion, she gave an evasive answer. “Maybe.” 

“That’s okay, you don’t have to tell me you like it. I’ll just do it more often.” He was grinning at her, but she was rolling her eyes at him. 

“Never mind,” she said as she grabbed a pillow and lay her body down on it, scrolling through her messages with Jeongin in order to distract herself from looking at Minho, who put boxers and shorts on, and nothing else. They were all ordinary text messages, ranging from recent pictures of meals they’d eaten to memories of their younger years back when they were still studying. They did nothing to calm her nerves, though, because Minho placed his hands on either side of her body and peered over her shoulder, and she was rendered absolutely frozen because of his proximity. 

“You made strawberry milk a few days ago without telling me?” He then chose to place his entire body weight on her as punishment for her not telling him things, leaving her a laughing mess under Minho’s body. “You wound me so.” 

“Get off of me,” she said jokingly in between laughs. “You’re gonna crush me!” 

“I’m _dead_. You made strawberry milk without sharing!” 

Instead of answering she just rolled off to the side to reverse their positions, with her on top of and back to him. In a surprising turn of events, he wrapped his hands around her waist and circled around her, pinning her arms to her sides, just beside her head. She was then forced to stare at Minho’s famous adorably yet sexually threatening look, her heart pounding inside her chest. 

“This seems like a comfortable position for the both of us.” 

“It’s really not.” 

“For real? I can get off if you want to because if you don’t like it, I—“

Midway through his sentence, she couldn’t help but smile as his clutches loosened on her wrists and he started to babble, so she used this opportunity to place his face between her palms and lift her head up to kiss him lightly on the lips, surprising even herself considering… 

“That was the first time you ever kissed me,” Minho said in shock, probably not believing what had just happened. “For the first time in two and a half months, this is when you chose to finally do it? What made you do it?” 

She shrugged and played with the wet curls of his hair. “Sounds like you don’t like me doing it. Guess I’m going to have to cut it—“

He interrupted her sentence by crashing his lips against hers, and for the first time in the longest time, she kissed him back and deepened the kiss by wrapping her arms around his neck and pulling him down to her. He slipped one arm under her as she arched into him, just as he used his free hand to caress her thigh, something that almost made her faint right then and there. This was the first time they were ever making out, so to say that she gave it her all was a little bit embarrassing. It looked like Minho was so used to this kind of thing, while she was rusty as hell. The last time she did this… well, it didn’t end up so well. 

In any case, she was enjoying it, but she knew she had to take it slow. She pulled away for a bit, and knowing her lips were probably swollen at this point, her cheeks turned the reddest of hues and she looked away from him, recognizing that the steaminess level was through the roof. 

“You’re going to kill me, Lee Minho,” she said against his lips, finding herself unable to stop kissing him as she placed another peck on his lips. “You really are.” 

“It’ll be a good death, I suppose,” he whispered back and went back to kissing her. It was another half a minute of that before the vibrations of a phone started disturbing their ritual. “Jesus Christ.” 

“Go get it,” she mumbled as she released her hold on him, effectively laying down in bed, sighing as Minho, almost angrily, grabbed his phone from the bedside table. She couldn’t help but laugh at the situation, getting cockblocked by a phone call. This had never happened to her in her twenty-seven years of living, but it was just a hilarious spot to be in. 

Minho sighed as he picked up his phone and held it in front of his face. “Hwang Hyunjin, you are ruining a _very important moment_ right now,” he scolded. “This had better be fucking important.” 

“Why are you naked? Actually, no, don’t answer that,” the face on the phone said. “Can you tell Byeol I have a letter from the Secretaries for her? Chan said he didn’t know her address so he sent it over to my house instead.” 

“Heard that?” Minho asked her as he momentarily shifted his gaze from his phone to her, and she nodded, giving him a thumbs-up. “Okay, we’re going back to what we were doing. Goodbye, old friend.” 

“Wait!” Hyunjin said, interrupting his friend’s impatient ass. “Don’t go drinking your heart out tonight; we have a performance tomorrow!” 

He groaned and rubbed his face and ruffled his hair in irritation. “I get it, Mom, I won’t drink tonight. Anything else?” 

“Hi, Minho! Hi, Byeol!” a deep voice from beyond called out, which could only mean Felix was there with his lover. “That’s all from me.”

She heard a small laugh from Hyunjin, but he continued anyway. “Is Byeol going tomorrow?”

“She is,” Minho said a little too happily. “She’s gonna be watching me hump the floor tomorrow, then she’s gonna be all horny and shit, and—“

“ _Lee Minho,_ ” she scolded.

“Sorry,” Minho said, grinning. “I’ll keep my emotions in check. Anyway, Mom, if that’s all you have to say, then we’ll be going back to what we were doing.” 

“Us, too,” Hyunjin said, and Minho gagged audibly. “What, just because you say it, I don’t get to?”

Minho rolled his eyes and ruffled his hair again, clearly wanting to get back to making out with her, rather than arguing with Hyunjin over who gets to say what. “You keep your sex life to yourself, and I keep my maybe-future sex life to myself. Is that what we can agree on?” 

“Nah, I’ll just ask Byeol,” Hyunjin said plainly and she heard Felix’s cackle on the other side. 

“ _Goodbye,_ Hwang Hyunjin,” Minho ultimately said and turned off the phone, tossing it randomly on the bed. “Well, I lost my erection.” 

“Not like we were going to do anything about it in the first place,” she said smugly as she stood up from the bed and went straight for the bathroom to brush her teeth, completely ignoring his cries of complaint. “It’s going to take more than making out with me to convince me to go to the next level.” 

“I can just suck my own dick in the meantime,” Minho called out from the room and Byeol almost choked on her toothbrush. A few seconds into brushing her teeth, he entered the bathroom and stared at her through the mirror, a bright smile on his face. 

She stared back at him through the mirror as well, but her eyebrow up and her face cocked to the side. She quickly finished brushing and cleaned her mouth. “You look like you have something to say.” 

“I do,” he said, rocking back and forth on his heels, seeming a little bit shy to say what he wanted to say. “Please don’t think that when I make sex jokes and advances on you that I’m pressuring you to have sex with me, because I’m really not pressuring you to have sex with me, and that I’m just really like this with you and only you all the time, and—“

She sighed midway into his babbling and pulled him into the softest of hugs, trying to convey her true feelings to him. It was a little bit weird embracing him when he was half-naked, but she guessed it was the right move to pull in order to shush him and calm his nerves down. “I get you,” she said softly, burying her face in the crook of his neck as she felt strong arms wrap around her tiny body. “Thank you for not forcing me into having sex with you, because that really means a lot.” 

Minho was silent for a while, until he spoke, and it was one of the most beautiful sentences to come out of a person’s mouth. “I’ll wait for you.” 

Her grip on him got tighter as he said that and they stayed that way for a while, with him kissing the top of her head and rubbing circles on the small of her back, which was strangely comforting yet craze-inducing. It was a sweet moment between the two of them, and she would treasure it forever. 

A few moments later, Minho jumped into the bed and nuzzled into the covers, considering that he was sleeping half-naked in a room with the temperature set to twenty degrees. A short time thereafter, Byeol slid into the blanket, too. Before she laid her head down on the pillow, she saw Minho stretch out his arms with an expectant yet an adorably innocent and awkward smile on his face. Sighing jokingly, she found herself slipping into those lean arms and placing her head on his toned chest, seeing as it was actually pretty comfortable, since it was only the third time she was doing this. 

“This feels nice,” Minho said, surprisingly truthfully. “I hope you don’t kick me in the middle of the night.” 

“What if I told you I’m a serial kicker?” 

“I’d still hug you.” 

“Nice.” 

It was at that moment that he kissed the top of her head, and she almost cried at that. It’s been so long ever since she felt something this deep, something this loving. Maybe it was a wonder how she ended up with Lee Minho of all people, and in Verona of all places, but she couldn’t help but feel happy and content with how things worked out, and how things _will_ work out in the future—she swore. He was something special, and she knew that he would be worth the effort. 

She slept well that night.

Byeol woke up the next morning still in Minho’s arms, with the latter still in deep sleep. It was a little bit late into the morning considering they fell asleep past midnight, but she took her time and stayed in his warm arms for a little while longer. 

The younger of them stirred after half an hour and she looked up at him. Rubbing his eyes with one hand and gently caressing her hair with the other, he stretched like a cat and then kissed her on the head which made her smile, just a little bit more than she’d like to admit. Realizing she was awake, he grabbed his glasses and put them on, and wrapped his arm around her tightly and nuzzled his face into her hair. 

“You’re going to crush me for real this time,” she said. 

“You’ll be fine,” he mumbled. 

“My hair’s dirty.” 

“I’ll be fine.” 

She breathed a laugh and hugged him a little tighter, somewhat scared that if she didn’t, she would lose him to the void forever. They wordlessly stayed like that for a while until she heard Minho’s alarm go off, and she was about to smash the phone for being so noisy until he reached over to the bedside table and turned it off, simply going back to cuddling her. 

“You’re going to be late,” Byeol said.

“The technical rehearsal can go fuck itself,” he mumbled sleepily, laughing at his own remark. “Hyunjin and Felix can most likely cover for me.” 

“And let them take the blame for your late ass? I don’t think so,” she said as she almost painfully detached herself from Minho’s arms, with him protesting by trying to pull her back into bed. She almost did, but she had enough strength in her to stay away. She looked at him from where she was, and he had a pout and puppy dog eyes on his face. “Don’t do this, Lee Minho.”

His pout didn’t disappear as he said, “But I wanna cuddle.” 

“Get up, please.” 

“No.” 

“I won’t suck you off in the future.” 

“I’m up,” he said, laughing, as he quickly threw the covers away from his body and stood up from the bed. 

She rolled her eyes and rolled off of the mattress, following closely behind Minho, who grabbed a glass and filled it with drinking water. She parted the curtains leading to the balcony, and drank in the sunlight filtering through the windows. It was way too sunny for comfort, but she didn’t really mind it since she was inside. It felt rightly warm, especially when a certain someone hugged her from behind, placing his head on top of hers. 

“You’re adorably small,” he said.

“ _Wow,_ Minho,” she dragged out, almost hurt if it weren’t for his next comment.

“You’re the perfect size for me, though.”

“Again, _wow._ ” 

She felt his chest rumble when he laughed, and he spun her around to face him, his face almost unreachable with her current height. It wasn’t like she was going to grow any taller, but this was an okay difference, she guessed. 

“Move, move, move,” she said, slightly pushing him away for him to start getting ready, and he finally did, albeit reluctantly. 

While Minho was showering, she laid back down on the bed and grabbed her phone, ready to text Jeongin, who she knew would be in school by the time that she and Minho would arrive. “ _Oi. Meet me in school in an hour or so?_ ” 

“ _Can’t in an hour, got classes. Free after lunch, though._ ”

“ _Works for me. See you at the faculty around lunch.”_

She let go of her phone and turned in bed just so she wouldn’t see half-naked Minho for the second time in twenty-four hours, which would just mean Byeol immediately jumping his bones for the very first time. Erasing that thought from her mind, she grabbed her phone again and started scrolling down her Twitter feed, thankful that only Jeongin and a handful of her other friends followed that account because she may or may not have tweeted about Minho too much the past few days. 

Once the bathroom door swung open, she decided it was time for her to shower, even if she wanted to see half-naked Minho again for just a few seconds more. Nevertheless, she dragged her body to the shower and, well, showered. She came out with a towel wrapped around her body, her hair a little bit dried, and Minho staring at her from the bed. 

He looked absolutely delicious in his black polo, the first two buttons unbuttoned and his sleeves rolled up to his elbows. Paired with black slacks and similarly colored leather shoes, he looked like a proper CEO—maybe even more than that. It was a different side to him that she’d never seen before, and she would be lying if she said she didn’t like it. In any case, his gaze and his smirk traveled from her legs up to her chest and then to her face, his expression changing from a self-satisfied look into genuine happiness just like that. It was a little bit scary, but she decided to roll with it.

“Such a pervert, Lee Minho, such a pervert.” 

“Hey, all I’m doing is looking at you,” he retorted. 

“Doesn’t mean that you’re not having any pervy thoughts in your head right now,” she said back. 

“Maybe you’re right,” he said with a cheeky smile. 

Instead of arguing with him, she simply rolled her eyes and slid the closet door open, trying to look for a set of clothes that’ll match the caliber of his outfit. Finally, she found a white, oversized, long-sleeved polo and a knee-length, red and white, floral, A-line skirt in the back of the closet, a place she never thought she would visit again. She brought the clothes inside with her, and after she was dressed, she dried her hair completely before emerging from the bathroom. 

“ _Wow,_ ” Minho dragged out, once again looking at her from head to toe. “You look like you’re dressed for a photoshoot.” 

“So do you, Mr. Lee Minho, CEO,” she said, sitting on the bed with him. “I feel underdressed next to you.” 

He looked down at what he was wearing and pouted, expressionless. “I gotta look good every single day if I’m going to pretend like I have my life together.” 

“Even going to dance practice?” 

“I’m known as That One Rich Guy,” he explained. “I try to live my life as simply as possible, but my dad keeps getting in my way, so I just try to carry myself how I want to, as much as I can.” 

“Hmm,” she hummed. “What’s up with your dad, anyway? I thought you took over the family business.” 

He shrugged, rubbing his hands on his thighs, clearly uncomfortable with the topic. “There are some things that he’s in charge of, and there are some things that I’m in charge of. Sometimes those things overlap and we cross paths, and sometimes those things get lost in the way we handle the things… and each other.” 

“So, basically, what you’re saying is that you have a bad relationship with your father and that he runs a part of your company, and sometimes he gets in the way of operations, so you butt heads with each other, even if he basically gave you the company to run on your own?”

“Holy fuck, stop reading me like that.” 

“Eh, it’s what I do,” she said with the smallest and sliest of smiles. “What’s the deal with your dad? I thought you said he was nice.”

He sighed, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees, rubbing his hands together. “I never said he was nice; I had to work hard and play hard to get to where I am now, and he never made it easy. I’ve only been running the company for three years, but I’ve been busting my ass ever since I was twenty-years-old, and I’m twenty-six now.” 

“I have so many questions,” she said, dumbfounded. “Firstly, I still can’t believe it; how are you younger than me?”

“Ooh, kinky,” he said jokingly. “I’ve always wanted a woman that could dominate me.” 

She rolled her eyes and pretended to vomit, prompting a laugh from the younger. “Plus, how young did you graduate? I can’t possibly think about leaving school and working to get to the CEO level at such a young age; I don’t think I could even do it at twenty-years-old, to be quite honest.”

“Yeah, don’t even think about it,” he said, groaning loudly. “If you see him on the streets, disengage and run in the opposite direction if you can.” 

“Sounds like you had a rough childhood,” she deduced, and he nodded, knowing she was right. “I can only hope to understand such a relationship with my parents.” 

“Had a good childhood, I suppose?” 

She shrugged, an evasive response coming out of her mouth. “It was okay.” 

“That’s good,” he said a little bit awkwardly, knowing that he never experienced the proper love of a fatherly unit. 

She sighed a little too blaringly and stood up, stretching her hand out to him, which he took, and she used this opportunity to pull him closer to her and wrap her arms around his neck. He seemed a little bit surprised, his eyes widening and his lips curling down. “Look, you may have a past, but I just want to know if I have a place in your future.” 

“For fuck’s sake, did you just—“

“No one asked for your opinion on the lines I use on you,” she said with finality, the biggest smile plastered on her face. “Just wondering how it would feel like if you were in my position, and that if I were you.” 

“I can get with that. I’d date myself if given the chance.” 

“So does that mean you don’t like me?” she said, detaching herself from him, feigning seriousness. “I’m sorry I’m not the woman you think I am.” 

“No, wait, I didn’t mean—“

She broke into great laughter because he had the most confused but most worried expression painted across his face. “If I had a mirror right now, you would really laugh at your reaction,” she said and took his hand. “Come on, Mr. CEO; you’ve got a technical rehearsal to go to.” 

“You really are a nuisance, Lee Byeol.” 

She only smiled at him as they reached the elevator and got out of the apartment building. They walked hand-in-hand towards the university which was around two kilometers away, enjoying the comfortable silence that they put themselves in. 

In the middle of their walk, Byeol noticed that Minho was walking a little slower than usual, and he gave her the answer why: he was desperately in need for a little brunch. She decided to bring him to the nearest café to satisfy his cravings. 

The small establishment offered a variety of meals and snacks, and Minho decided to indulge his child self by ordering chicken poppers, and to gratify his older self, he bought himself an americano. Meanwhile, she got a bowl of Spam fried rice and a slice of strawberry cake. 

“Good choice,” he said as they sat down on a circular table, a restaurant buzzer in his one hand, and a receipt on the other. 

“I thought so,” she said and set her bag down on the seat beside her. “Hyunjin told me that strawberry was your favorite flavor, and I thought maybe you’d want to share it with me.” 

In an unexpected turn of events, he slightly squealed, the high-pitched noise coming out of his mouth an excited one. “Good, good, good, good, good.” 

She laughed a little bit as they continued their banter. It turned out that Minho liked watching movies and anime in his spare time, which was pretty much little to nonexistent. He also liked being alone most of the time, which was a stark contrast to when he was in relationships, and that he never really liked spending too much on dates, even if his family was rich and all that. There was a moment of discovery a while back when he realized that he didn’t really like it when the person he dated would come over to his apartment because they usually stayed for his money, and not just for him. Byeol promised never to come to his apartment, but will indeed stay for the money, and Minho just scowled at her, while she giggled at his expression. 

Finally, they claimed their food at the counter and ate quickly because Minho was around forty-five minutes late, and Hyunjin had already called twice in the past twenty minutes. With full bellies, they walked hand-in-hand again towards the university, but let go when they entered the school grounds. 

The auditorium was just around the sometimes too spacious cafeteria. There was a lobby area in front of the two sets of double doors, and a table was set up just between them. Backstage was just a little ways away, circling around to the back where a small garden was, too. 

There were a number of people in the hall, some of them with walkie-talkies scrambling around the lobby, while the other people looked like they were just conversing with each other, but in cliques. They looked like they were dressed for either the gym or a fashion show. Among them were Hyunjin and Felix donned in matching plain black t-shirts and black joggers, talking to some girls with blue baseball caps. She could only guess what type of people they were. 

“Your group, I presume?” she asked, pointing to the crowd. 

A male dancer passed by and gave Minho the ol’ fistbump and patting of the shoulder as a greeting. “You’re not wrong. Not wrong at all.” 

“Well, I’m going to leave you with them and make my way to the faculty of humanities to ask for the end of my leave. I don’t think I would exactly fit in here.” 

“You’ve had dancing experience back in Verona,” he said, his eyes narrowing teasingly as he talked. 

“Ugh, don’t remind me.” She shuddered and he simply blew a breath out of his nose. 

“You don’t want to watch me hump the floor?” he said, nudging her with his elbow. “I can guarantee that it’ll make you like me even more, maybe even make you think that I’m somewhat fuckable somehow. It’s—“

“Okay, you can close your mouth now,” she said, putting a finger to his lips. This gesture was the talk of the town when a couple of heads turned their way, and she retracted her hand almost immediately when people started whispering amongst themselves. “You’re untouchable here, aren’t you?” 

He shrugged. “I guess it comes with the reputation,” he said sadly. “It’s okay, though. You can touch me anytime and anywhere you want.” 

“God Almighty in heaven,” she exclaimed, closing her eyes and clasping her hands together in prayer, “please give me the patience not to put this man six feet under the ground.”

“There are other things I’d like to be under, but we can reserve that thought for the future,” he said, shrugging again and tilting his head to the side, but slower. “Anyway, you said you were going back to the school of humanities to put an end to your leave?”

She nodded and put her hands behind her back. “I think it’s time I get back to work. It’s been how long ever since my last research topic and I may need to come up with a new one before the third quarter.” 

“Wait, you’re not teaching classes?” 

“I need to finish a topic before the end of this year and they’ll see if I’m fit to teach classes again.”

“Well, that’s some type of bullshit right there.” 

Shrugging, disheartened, she said, “It’s how the school works, so. Besides, I think I have a research paper lined up in my head that might possibly be approved by my superior. All I have to do is present it.”

He processed what she said and came up with a short reply. “Good luck with that.”

“Thanks,” she replied. “Good luck with technical rehearsals. I’ll see you during you break or something?” 

Nodding, he said, “I’ll text you.” 

“Guess this is goodbye, then.” 

“Not for long. Don’t miss me too much.” 

She pointed to the inside of her mouth and gagged, prompting yet another laugh from the younger. “I’ll see you later.” She gave him a small pat on the shoulder, albeit awkwardly, and was on her way. 

The trek to the humanities department was a little too short. Because of all the walking she did back in Italy, the walking seemed a little less tiring to her, even if she had to walk a total of four kilometers just in an hour alone, including the journey from the apartment. 

When she arrived at the faculty room, she was welcomed back with open arms and loud cheers by her fellow teachers, even if she hurriedly went straight to her cubicle. It was a mess, really, but then again, when was she not? The presents she got from her students were still on the shelves; the stuffed bear holding a red heart sat next to the wooden music box that played Twinkle, Twinkle. There was also the Harry Potter wand she got from co-teacher, straight from overseas. She cleared all the papers and books off of her desk and organized them in the floral paper boxes and wooden cabinets underneath, finding that there was more dust settled under the desk. Sad.

It was about thirty minutes into her fixing the cubicle when a familiar voice disturbed her. “Bitch, I missed you,” Jeongin whispered, hugging her from the side, scaring the living lights out of her. 

“Jeongin, you’re crushing me,” she said, her throat and her body a little too restricted for her taste, though she hugged him back. When he let go, she exhaled the largest of breaths. “You always give the tightest hugs.” 

“That’s because I haven’t seen you in three weeks.” 

“It’s just been three weeks.” 

“Is that what you say to your new boyfriend?” he said with a grin, clearly mischievous. “When do I get to meet the dude?”

Her lips turned into a duck pout as she tried to process what he’d just said. “First and foremost, he’s not my boyfriend—not yet, that is, I guess. Secondly, you’re going to meet him after he humps the floor during the show later.” 

“ _Humping the floor?_ ” Jeongin almost screamed, if it weren’t for Byeol’s shushing and hits on his head. “Is he that sexy?” 

She couldn’t help but let out a small “aww” at her friend’s innocent way of speaking. “Sure, I guess you could say that.” 

“You’re one lucky gal, I’m telling you,” he said, crossing his arms. “First, you finally have enough funds to go to Verona, your dream destination, after talking about it for almost two years; second, you find someone in that same country that actually likes you for who you are, and you end up seeing each other more often than we do; third, you’re going to watch him perform _the_ sexiest dance ever: humping the floor.” 

Her face made contact with her palms as she couldn’t believe that there were these things coming out of her best friend’s mouth. “Jeongin, you’re unbelievable.” 

“So is your relationship with Mr. Lee,” he replied with a grin. “I can’t believe he’s a distiller, _and_ the CEO of his own company. Looks like you hit the jackpot with dating.” 

“He’s more than that, you know,” she said, echoing the words he’d said back in Italy. “There are some other things that make up the Lee Minho I know.” 

“Oh? Like what?” 

She mulled it over for a second before coming up with an answer, one that she didn’t really expect to say, like, ever. “There are times when he’s overly sexual that I don’t know if my heart can take it, but there seems to be a line that he doesn’t cross because he still lets me know that he cares.” 

“Overly sexual, huh? That’s interesting.” 

“There are also times when he’s the sweetest little shit in the entire world, and I still don’t know what to do when that happens. It’s like my brain hits the off switch and just goes with whatever he says because I just feel like… it’s right.”

Jeongin smiled at her, amused at what she’d just said. “Okay, you just cursed, so I’m assuming he has the biggest effect on you. Sounds like you’re in love, little Lee Byeol.” 

She rolled her eyes and said, “It’s only been two months, Jeongin.” 

“Time has nothing to do with love, y’know,” he said, and it was probably the wisest thing to come out of his mouth. “You dated The Devil for almost a year, and look where that got you. You’re dating Lee Minho and he seems like the nicest guy on Earth, considering that even if he’s overly sexual, he lets his love for you be known. Also, don’t you think that this guy loves you back?” 

She was absolutely dumbfounded at the words that had just tumbled out of his mouth. It was something to ponder over, though she had to admit that it was a little bit early. At this point, did Minho really love her? There was a point that he _did_ mention something about love at first dance, but she knew she dismissed it as mere attraction, something that he did when he was still in love with Hyunjin. At this point, did he actually develop those kind of feelings for her? “Uh…” 

“Sounds like you’ve got some thinking to do,” he said a little bit too happily, as if he was enjoying the inner turmoil she was feeling. Instead, she diverted her attention to fidgeting with the papers she held in her hand. 

It was now unnervingly silent in her head.


	8. Epilogue II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welp, here we are! This is the end of the story. Apologies for taking such a long time to finish this because I was swamped with schoolwork and other things at home, s o I didn't have time to proofread this properly ahuhu but in any case, here it is! I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did writing it, but if you didn't, tell me what you think I should improve on! I'd appreciate all criticisms ehe

Sadly, four hours and a few sit-ins in Jeongin’s classes later, she found herself back in the lobby of the auditorium, the place swamped with different types of people; parents, students, teachers, and contestants were scattered throughout the area. There was no sign of Minho anywhere, and she couldn’t be any happier because of all the thoughts she had in her brain. She physically cringed and shook the thoughts off.

“You okay?” Jeongin asked, looping his arm around hers.

“Sure,” she said, patting his hand. It was then that she entered headfirst into the chaos of the crowd, knowing that teachers, as per usual, entered school events for free. She and Jeongin found a seat near the stage, just a little bit off to the right from the center. It was a good seat, really, because she found the balance between craning her neck upwards and stretching it downwards just to see.

The show started around thirty minutes after everyone got into the auditorium, but she could barely focus when the MC started hyping up the crowd knowing that she had a lot of thinking to do, as Jeongin just said. The competition started and so did her thoughts.

If Minho really did care for her, was it enough to be called love? If she really did care for him, was it enough to be called love, too? What if the answer was “yes”? What would she do with herself then? There were so many questions that were left unanswered, but she knew only time would tell.

She almost missed the MC’s announcement of an intermission, and she and Jeongin went outside for a breath of fresh air, even if the crowd was, once again, flocking the place.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Jeongin asked worriedly. “You haven’t talked ever since the start of the show, and you didn’t even hear me screaming for this one team that did a hell of a lot of flips in the air.”

“I’m really sorry. It’s just… I’ve been thinking about, well, what you said earlier.”

He was speechless for a bit, but he came up with a response to her burdensome remark. “I’m sorry, too,” he said worriedly. “I didn’t mean for you to think so hard about that kind of stuff. I agree it’s a little bit—“

“No, it’s okay,” she interjected. “I’ll be fine.”

Jeongin shifted from foot to foot a little bit awkwardly, something he did when he was concerned about something. “Don’t think too hard about it.”

“I’ll try not to,” she said with a smile. “Don’t worry about me; it’s my relationship after all… even if it’s still not, uh, a relationship, I guess.”

His lips curled down into a sad pout. “I guess so.”

She laughed uncomfortably as she ran her hands through her hair and then clasping them behind her back. “I—“

There was a sudden hand across her waist, and from the excited look Jeongin was holding back, it could only mean one thing. She turned around and the first thing that came out of her mouth was an expletive, considering that Minho had his hair styled up so she could see his forehead—something that she hadn’t seen in the past two, three months—and it was glorious because it made him look a lot younger than he really was, and that it added a new dimension to how he looked. It looked like he had a little bit of makeup on because his eyes looked larger and his skin was a little bit smoother. He wore a red, silk, long-sleeved shirt with a black choker around his neck, with black slacks around his waist, and leather shoes on his feet. Sure it would be objectifying if she said he looked like an absolute snack, but she knew she wouldn’t get over it, not in a million years.

“Did you just curse at me?” Minho asked, his expression one of shock and amusement.

“She’s been doing a lot of it nowadays,” Jeongin said and held out his hand. “Hi, I’m Jeongin, the best friend.”

“Lee Minho,” he said back and shook his hand back. “I’m the one she’s been talking about all the time, I presume?”

Jeongin snorted. “Oh, yeah, definitely. Even this—“

Before he could say anything, she elbowed him in the ribs and he stood there, wheezing his lungs out. “Anyway,” she started, “you look good.”

“Am I fuckable yet?”

Jeongin choked on air and proceeded to move away, saying, “Okay, I’m going to go mingle with the other teachers I know and leave you two to your own devices. See you guys.”

“Forgive him; he’s always like this,” Byeol called out, and Jeongin gave her a thumbs up from behind. “Minho, you are getting yourself in so much trouble right now.”

“What?” he said with yet another cheeky grin. “I just asked what was in my head, and I just said it out loud.”

“In front of my best friend who you’ve met for thirty seconds?” she said, crossing her arms and tapping her foot in slight irritation.

He sighed and ran a hand through his sprayed hair ever so carefully, but there was a small smile on his face, apologetic. “Sorry about that. I promise with my whole hollow heart that I won’t make the same mistake again, especially in front of your best friend, Jeongin.”

She thought about it for a few seconds until she finally said, “Fine. Forgiven.”

“Good,” he said. “Then maybe we can make out again after the show over at your place.”

“Minho, I swear to god, your mind is always in the gutter,” she said, but teasingly. “Or, you know, we could always go to your place…”

He sucked in air through his teeth, anticipating her response. “Oh, no.”

“…and I come inside your room, I get amazed by the size of your…”

“Penis, I’m hoping.”

“…penthouse apartment. I’ll stay for the money and for the luxurious things, and you stay for my witty comebacks. It’s a win-win situation.”

He blew out a large sigh and Byeol simply laughed at him, punching his shoulder softly. “Dear god, you’re such a nuisance.” They exchanged laughter for a bit, and they just looked at each other for the shortest and most lingering of moments. “So, you enjoying the show?”

“Can’t say I do, but it’s pretty okay,” she said truthfully, though it wasn’t really about the show; it was more about the things she was feeling. “Look, Minho, I have something to ask you.”

He nodded and crossed his arms as if he was listening very intently. Maybe he was; she didn’t really know. “Anything. What is it?”

She fidgeted with the hem of her shirt before coming up with an answer. Was it really the time to ask him if he liked her that way? Or if he even had strong feelings for her at all? There were so many questions she wanted to ask him, but she didn’t know if she should will them into air at this time. Instead, she took a breath and dismissed it. “Never mind. It’s not that important.”

“Are you sure? It sure looked like it was something important.”

She shrugged awkwardly and nervously before saying, “It was just to say break a leg with your performance. You haven’t performed yet, so I’m assuming you’ve got the nerves.”

“You bet I do,” he said a little bit sadly. “It’s my first time performing in front of someone I—um.”

“In front of who?”

He put his fist in front of his mouth and cleared his throat, as if something got caught in it. “In front of you. Hmm. It’s kind of terrifying knowing you’re there in the crowd because, um, me fucking the floor might not live up to your expectations.”

“Why are you stuttering so much?”

“There are things in this world that should be more worrying to you, like global warming and people not recycling their trash. You should worry about those more.”

“Lee Minho, you’re not making any sense right now,” she said, still confused at why he was stumbling over his words. “In any case, good luck. Do your best to make me horny for you.”

His jaw dropped to the floor, laughing almost hysterically, and she felt good that she was a person that could make him laugh this much. “I’ll do that, sure.”

She simply stared at him when he uncharacteristically smiled sheepishly at her, looking like a little boy in front of his crush, and maybe he was, and maybe she was staring back at him with the same spirit. It made her a little bit love-struck, but she knew she didn’t want to acknowledge it at all because it would hurt her pride a little to know that she was falling this hard and this fast for someone she just met three months ago.

A sudden booming voice disturbed their staring at each other, the voice saying that there would only be five minutes left to the intermission, and that all performers should head backstage soon. “You should go,” she said, patting the side of his arm. “Your fellow dancers have been staring at us for the past ten minutes and I’d hate to tell them you’re dating someone.”

“Why don’t you wanna tell them that I’m dating you? I’m not ashamed of you or anything.”

“I might end up breaking poor little hearts if they knew,” she said. “I definitely know that there are people in there that would be devastated if they knew you were dating someone, either inside your dance troupe or out of it.”

“Are you saying that I’m fuckable to everyone but you?” he asked with a small pout.

“ _Go_ , Minho.”

“Fine, fine,” he said with finality. “I’ll come get you after the show, okay? Promise me you’ll wait for me?”

She didn’t know what it was that made her blurt it out, but she meant it in every single possible way. “Always.”

He smiled brighter than the sun and walked away from her, Jeongin’s presence replacing his, though both were welcome in this case. “Well, you look better now,” Jeongin said. “Guess you just needed a little pick-me-up.”

“Eh, I still have a lot of questions.” She hooked her arm around his as they started walking back towards the auditorium. “Looks like they’ll be answered another time.”

“Speaking of time, you should really remember what I said a while ago, that time has nothing to do with love,” he said. “It goes both ways, really. You’ll know if you’re ready.”

She sighed loudly, and he just chuckled at her. “Thanks. That really means a lot.”

Even if Jeongin stuck out her tongue at her, she knew she meant every word she said to him. She realized that the more she asked these questions the more it would worry her, so she decided to put them to rest for now, and know that there would be a feeling in her gut that would tell her she was ready. Trusting her instincts was, of course, sometimes not the way to go, but she knew this was the time to put them to use.

The show started once again, and this time, she was feeling a bit more intrigued by the performances. She had more energy to actually watch them and cheer on them along with Jeongin, and even critique some of the moves that she knew were a bit on the weird side. Finally, it was time for the judges to, well, judge the competitors on their routines, and the MC called out Stray Kids, the dance troupe she was waiting for, to perform next while the judges decided on who would win. Her heart was pounding inside her chest, and it didn’t help that Jeongin was squealing right beside her, patting her hand as fast as how a woodpecker would peck at a tree.

The lights turned down and the only person standing in the spotlight was Minho, his red shirt practically glistening and shining in the light. The crowd cheered as the beat started and a sexy saxophone tune followed soon after. There was a mixture of popping and litheness to Minho’s body as he danced, and she couldn’t help but gape at just how smooth his body flowed.

And suddenly, there it was: he jumped a little bit and landed on his hands, his body just following suit, his hips practically humping the floor. Another expletive came out of her mouth and Jeongin started laughing at her, but she couldn’t care less when he was just standing there, making her feel all sorts of things.

Meanwhile, the music died and a new one replaced it, this one having a tinge of darkness, some military-like snare beats of a drum, and an EDM track just behind it. This was more his style of dancing rather than the sensual one, his moves a symphony of fast-paced locking of the limbs and almost confusing leg work. It was almost too quick of a routine, so swift that she could barely keep up when the beat ended.

It was almost startling when Hyunjin and Felix appeared just behind him, the rest of the troupe acting like backup dancers. There were a lot of them, too many that she couldn’t count because they started moving so quickly. The stars of the show were the trio she’d met back in Verona, the three of them cooperating and working with the different dance styles each person had. Hyunjin was wildly different from Minho in the sense that Hyunjin had more powerful and exaggerated moves, while Felix was more agile and definitely more limber than the two.

She saw that Minho was smiling a sultry one when he was dancing, and that he ran his hands through his hair more often and more sexually that she would’ve liked. That, and he kept licking his lips all throughout the performance. The hip-hop slash pop beat continued as the backup dancers complemented the threesome in front. There were also too many body rolls and opening of the legs, Byeol just about to reach the limit of her threshold, though she couldn’t help but cheer him on, knowing that performing was his most favorite thing to do.

The performance continued for what seemed like another two minutes or so, with Minho executing moves like lifting his whole body up from lying down on the floor with just one hand, touching Hyunjin’s shoulder almost seductively and pushing him away while body rolling, and lastly, making eye contact with the audience in front and holding it until he ultimately turned away, ending the performance.

She cheered for them once again, whooping and clapping her hands along with the rest of the people inside the auditorium. She heard whispers of praise from the people behind and in front of her, complimenting just how it was expected of Stray Kids to hold such a good performance. It was her first time seeing them perform, and she’d never heard of them because she wasn’t really into the whole world of dance, but she knew she could appreciate a good performance when she saw one.

“That was so good,” Jeongin whispered to her as the judges came back up on stage. “You didn’t tell me he danced this well.”

She shrugged and said, “I didn’t know he danced this well, either. It’s my first time seeing him perform. Then again, he did do a good job when I invited him to dance in the Ballroom for Oldies back in Verona.”

“Oh, yeah, you told me about that. How did that go?”

Smiling as she recalled the thought, she almost slapped herself right there and then for thinking about Minho saying that he fell in love at first dance with her. “It was good. He hated it at first, but he eventually liked it.”

“That’s great,” he said back, and he slouched back in his seat.

The results were out and the very first stage act garnered the win. She shouted some positive words of encouragement for the performers, even though she was a little bit sad that she kind of missed the performance. Either way, she was happy for them.

She and Jeongin walked towards the exit, weaving through the people that wanted to have photoshoots with the performers, and at one point, she almost lost him in the crowd. Thankfully, they got out to one abandoned side of the auditorium unscathed, just people-watching.

“Man, so many people attended this competition,” he remarked.

“Well, this is considering that some of these kids want to be idols someday,” she deduced. “Maybe there were scouts in the audience.”

“That’s true,” he agreed.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a figure clad in a red silk shirt come out of the backstage area, and was almost immediately swamped by the crowd of different kinds of people; reporters, students, and mostly girls. She couldn’t help but smile to herself when she saw Minho struggling to contain his excitement, but also his look of discomfort.

“Oh, before I forget,” Jeongin said, bringing out a pink envelope from his sling bag. “Minho forgot to give this to you a while ago, so he found me and gave it to me instead.”

“This is the letter from Verona,” she said, clearly intrigued and thrilled. “Chan sent it to me, apparently. I wonder what’s inside.” She carefully tore the envelope open and brought out the long baby pink piece of paper from it. She read the contents while almost crying because of the words Chan had written to her.

The letter read, “ _Good day, Byeol! This is Chan, hoping that you remember me from all this time. I remember Hyunjin talking to me recently about what happened between you and Minho, and how you fell in love with each other out here in the city of love. I just wanted to congratulate you on this feat, and that I’ll always be here to support you in whatever you choose to do._ ”

She found herself smiling a little bit as she continued to read the rest of the letter.

“ _I remember you telling young Hwang Hyunjin that love needs the biggest amount of strength and perseverance, and I can only hope that you continue to love with as much strength as you possibly can, but I’m also here to tell you that love is a myriad of traits and kinds, and your relationship with Minho is a testament to that._ ”

She looked in Minho’s direction, watching as he dealt with the dissipating crowd. She also found herself falling a little bit deeper for him, Chan’s letter being the sole catalyst of her plunge, but she knew she had to keep her feelings in check if she wanted to make it work. Either way, she knew she was falling hard and fast.

“ _If you could only see the effects you’ve had on your newfound friends here in Verona, you would definitely feel the presence and see the results of loving with your entire heart. Knowing this, I hope you go forward and never look back._ ”

Jeongin was peering over her shoulder and reading the rest of the letter with her, and she couldn’t care less about who read it, knowing that it would just be love advice to anyone who peruses it.

“T _his letter has gone on for long enough, and I can only offer some pieces of advice. There will be times when you feel like you’re ready to give up, and I sincerely hope you never go through that, but if the time comes, I wish that you look in Minho’s direction and find yourself thinking why you even came up with the thought in the first place. There will be times when you find yourself lost and not knowing what to do, and I wish that you look at Minho and find all your prayers and questions answered_.”

Close to tears before reading the last few lines of the letter, she kept looking at Minho who was still trying to pull himself out of the crowd that had phone cameras and DSLRs pointing at his face. He looked unknowing and uncomfortable, and she could only chuckle at the predicament he was facing, and how Chan had the amazing letter writing skills of a god.

“ _Love, it turns out, is what happened between you and Minho. Great as it is, I hope you continue to do it. All I can offer in your case, you will never be without it, and that is simply enough. With Seo Changbin, Kim Woojin, Kim Seungmin, and all my love, Bang Chan_.”

Inside the envelope was a photocopied version of Hyunjin’s letter to Juliet, and she smiled a little sadly, missing Verona, and a little in awe, a little bit in love. She put back the letter in its rightful place and shoved it down her satchel, making sure not to crumple it or deform it in any way.

“That was beautiful, Byeol,” Jeongin said, his eyes glassy and tears threatening to spill from his eyes. “I hope you and Minho really end up together because I’ll be really sad if you don’t. You guys are perfect for each other.”

She chuckled as she closed her bag. “Jeongin, you’re impossible,” she said jokingly, though he was kind of right in hoping. “But I really do hope that, too. He’s a nice guy, even if he keeps making sexual advances towards me.”

“That’s great,” he said back, grinning. “Anyway, Byeol, I should get home now. I still have to grade papers and encode them into the system. I’ll see you soon?”

“Soon,” she repeated and hugged him tightly. “Thank you.”

“No problem at all.” He gave her one last salute and was on his way, passing through the gates and the parking lot until he was but a speck in her vision.

She took a deep breath, trying to give herself a break after reading Chan’s letter. However, she walked towards the four, five girls that were surrounding Minho and stood a few ways away, just enough so that he would be able to notice her if he looked up a little bit. It was a few seconds before he noticed her and smiled.

“Alright, guys, I gotta go,” he said to the girls, and they let out words of disappointment. “Thank you for enjoying the performance, though. See you again soon!”

She chuckled at his awkwardness and started walking away so that he could just catch up to her. As soon as they were out of earshot and eyesight, Minho took the chance to hold her hand and intertwine his fingers with hers.

Chan’s letter cleared up some things for her. It was a relief that it did, and that the questions that were unanswered in her brain were a little bit clearer now, a little bit answered, but not fully. It was fine, though, because she knew what she was going to say, and she knew she just needed the small push to actually say it.

She agreed with Jeongin to say maybe it was a little bit early, but her gut and her instincts told her that maybe she needed it.

“Are you sleeping over tonight?” she asked, hopeful.

“Can you still accommodate my annoying ass for another night? If you can, I brought enough spare clothes for tonight and tomorrow,” he said, squeezing her hand just a little bit.

Under the yellow-leafed trees, the sparkling starlight, and the bright full moon, it was almost perfect to be strolling with the one she affectionately felt for. It was too perfect, she guessed, considering she was trying to muster up the courage to say what she wanted to say, to ask him the ultimate question, to prepare herself for the worst. Well, she wouldn’t know what would happen unless she actually tried, so it was now or never. “That’ll be fine,” she said. “Was just going to ask if you would like to—“

“Make out?”

“—be my boyfriend.”

Minho stopped in his tracks quite literally, letting go of her hand as she walked a little bit forward, leaving him, but ultimately turning around and holding her bag in both of her hands, her hold on it tightening, anticipating what he was going to say.

  
She realized it wasn’t too soon to ask him to get closer to her. If her feelings for him were genuine, then she would do her best to make him feel them. If she wasn’t going to let him in, then what would be the purpose of pursuing the relationship, right?

“Holy fuck, are you serious?” he asked, one hand on his waist and the other running a hand frantically through his hair. The duffel bag on his shoulder almost dropped to the dirty floor if he hadn’t felt it at the last minute. “You’re not shitting me, right? And this isn’t a dream? This is actually happening?”

She was a bit baffled at his response, and she didn’t know what to say at first, either, though she came up with a few words to say after a few moments. “I was really confused about it ever since I woke up this morning, and I guess everything that happened today pointed me in this direction—hopefully the right one,” she said, and she took a deep breath before continuing. “I don’t know what came over me, to be honest, but Lee Minho, if you’ll have me, I promise to make you happy for every single moment that we’re together, and even when we’re apart. That is, if you’ll be my boyfriend.”

“Are you kidding me?” he suddenly asked, and she was a bit taken aback.

“N-no…”

“The answer will always be yes, Lee Byeol,” he said, blowing out a confused yet relieved laugh. “I can’t believe you asked me first, but yes, I will be that.”

She giggled like a toddler and threw her body on his, effectively enveloping him in a hug, which was the first time she did something as instinctively as that. He hugged her back tightly as they enjoyed each other’s proximity, each other’s feelings.

Let it be known that underneath the trees, the starlight, and the moonlight, would be the start of the rest of their lives.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to all those who gave kudos and gave this a read! Even if you didn't finish it, it's alright! At least you were part of the journey. Still thinking if I should make a sequel to this ehe but we'll see in the future! Thanks, everyone, and see you in the next story!


End file.
